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Developers of reusable software elements, such as libraries, usually have the responsibility to provide comprehensive and high quality documentation to enable eective reuse of those elements. The eective reuse of libraries depends upon the quality of the API (Application Program Interface) documentation. Well established libraries typically have comprehensive API documentation, for example in Javadocs. However, they also typically lack examples and explanations, which may dicult the eective reuse of the library. StackOverow.com (SO) is a Question and Answer service directed to issues related to software development. In SO, a developer can post questions related to a programming topic and other members of the site can provide answers to help him/her solve the problem he/she has at hand. Despite of the increasing use of SO by the software development community, the information related to a particular library is spread along the website. Thus, SO still lacks an organization of its crowd knowledge. In this dissertation, we present a semi-automatic approach that organizes the information available on SO in order to build a kind of documentation for APIs, called cookbooks (recipe-oriented books). The cookbooks generated by the approach are called crowd cookbooks. In order to evaluate the proposed approach, cookbooks were generated for three APIs widely used by the software development community: SWT,LINQ and QT. Desired features that cookbooks must meet were identied and a study with human subjects was conducted to assess to what extent the generated cookbook meet those features. Through the study it was also possible to identify what is the perceived usefulness by the subjects in relation to the use of cookbooks in APIs learning. The results showed that the cookbooks built using the proposed strategy, in general, meet the identied features. Furthermore, most human subjects considered that cookbooks do not have an appropriate format to the learning of APIs. Desenvolvedores de elementos reusáveis de software, como as bibliotecas, em geral têm a responsabilidade de disponibilizar documentação abrangente e de alta qualidade para permitir o reuso efetivo desses elementos. O reuso efetivo de bibliotecas depende da qualidade da documentação da API (Interface para Programação de Aplicativos). Bibliotecas bem estabelecidas tipicamente têm documentação abrangente, por exemplo em Javadocs. Porém, essa documentação geralmente carece de exemplos e explicações, o que pode dicultar o reuso efetivo da biblioteca. Stackoverow.com (SO) é um serviço de perguntas e respostas (Q&A) direcionado a questões relacionadas ao desenvolvimento de software. No SO, um desenvolvedor pode postar perguntas relacionadas a um tópico de programação e outros membros do site podem disponibilizar respostas para ajudá-lo a resolver o problema que ele tem em mãos. Apesar da utilização crescente do SO pela comunidade de desenvolvimento de software, a informação relação a um biblioteca está espalhada ao longo do site. Assim, o SO ainda carece de uma organização do crowd knowledge nele contido. Nessa dissertação, será apresentada uma abordagem semi-automatizada que organiza a informação disponível no SO para a construção de um tipo de documentação para APIs, conhecido por cookbooks (livros orientados a receitas). Os cookbooks produzidos pela abordagem proposta são chamados crowd cookbooks. Para avaliar a abordagem proposta foram gerados cookbooks para três APIs amplamente utilizadas pela comunidade de desenvolvimento de software: SWT, LINQ e QT. Foram identicadas características desejáveis de cookbooks e realizado um estudo com sujeitos humanos para entender em que grau os cookbooks construídos atendem a estas características. Por meio estudo também foi possível compreender melhor os pers de uso dos cookbooks mais apropriados em relação ao aprendizado de APIs. Os resultados mostraram que os cookbooks construídos pela estratégia proposta, em geral, atendem às características identicadas. Além disso, a maior parte dos sujeitos humanos considerou que cookbooks não possuem um formato adequado ao aprendizado de APIs. Mestre em Ciência da Computação

Well established libraries typically have API documentation. However, they frequently lack examples and explanations, possibly making difficult their effective reuse. Stack Overflow is a question-and-answer website oriented to issues related to software development. Despite the increasing adoption of Stack Overflow, the information related to a particular topic (e.g., an API) is spread across the website. Thus, Stack Overflow still lacks organization of the crowd knowledge available on it. Our target goal is to address the problem of the poor quality documentation for APIs by providing an alternative artifact to document them based on the crowd knowledge available on Stack Overflow, called crowd cookbook. A cookbook is a recipe-oriented book, and we refer to our cookbook as crowd cookbook since it contains content generated by a crowd. The cookbooks are meant to be used through an exploration process, i.e. browsing. In this paper, we present a semi-automatic approach that organizes the crowd knowledge available on Stack Overflow to build cookbooks for APIs. We have generated cookbooks for three APIs widely used by the software development community: SWT, LINQ and QT. We have also defined desired properties that crowd cookbooks must meet, and we conducted an evaluation of the cookbooks against these properties with human subjects. The results showed that the cookbooks built using our approach, in general, meet those properties. As a highlight, most of the recipes were considered appropriate to be in the cookbooks and have self-contained information. We concluded that our approach is capable to produce adequate cookbooks automatically, which can be as useful as manually produced cookbooks. This opens an opportunity for API designers to enrich existent cookbooks with the different points of view from the crowd, or even to generate initial versions of new cookbooks., Comment: Accepted at Information and Software Technology - Journal - Elsevier. 16 pages

Developers of reusable software elements, such as libraries, usually have the responsibility to provide comprehensive and high quality documentation to enable effective software reuse. The effective reuse of libraries depends upon the quality of the API (Application Program Interface) documentation. Well established libraries typically have comprehensive API documentation, for example in Javadocs. However, they typically lack examples and explanations, which makes the effective reuse of the library difficult. StackOverflow.com (SO) is a Question and Answer service directed to issues related to software development. On SO, developers post questions related to a programming topic and other members of the SO community can provide answers to help them solving their problems. Despite the increasing adoption of SO, the information related to a particular topic is spread across the website. Thus, SO still lacks organization of its crowd knowledge. In this paper, we present an automatic approach that organizes the information available on SO in order to build cookbooks (recipe-oriented books) for APIs. The cookbooks are meant to be used through an exploration process (browsing). In order to evaluate the proposed approach, we have generated cookbooks for three APIs widely used by the software development community: SWT, STL and LINQ. Desired properties that cookbooks must meet were identified and a study was conducted to assess to what extent the generated cookbook meet those properties.

StackOverflow.com (SO) is a Question and Answer service oriented to support collaboration among developers in order to help them solving their issues related to software development. In SO, developers post questions related to a programming topic and other members of the site can provide answers to help them. The information available on this type of service is also known as "crowd knowledge" and currently is one important trend in supporting activities related to software development and maintenance. We present an approach that makes use of "crowd knowledge" available in SO to recommend information that can assist developers in their activities. This strategy recommends a ranked list of pairs of questions/answers from SO based on a query (list of terms). The ranking criteria is based on two main aspects: the textual similarity of the pairs with respect to the query (the developer's problem) and the quality of the pairs. Moreover, we developed a classifier to consider only "how-to" posts. We conducted an experiment considering programming problems on three different topics (Swing, Boost and LINQ) widely used by the software development community to evaluate the proposed recommendation strategy. The results have shown that for 77.14% of the assessed activities, at least one recommended pair proved to be useful concerning the target programming problem. Moreover, for all activities, at least one recommended pair had a source code snippet considered reproducible or almost reproducible.

Software metrics is a valuable mechanism to assess the quality of software systems. Metrics can help the automated analysis of the growing data available in software repositories. Coupling metrics is a kind of software metrics that have been extensively used since the seventies to evaluate several software properties related to maintenance, evolution and reuse tasks. For example, several works have shown that we can use coupling metrics to assess the reusability of software artifacts available in repositories. However, thresholds for software metrics to indicate adequate coupling levels are still a matter of discussion. In this paper, we investigate the impact of software categories on the coupling level of software systems. We have found that different categories may have different levels of coupling, suggesting that we need special attention when comparing software systems in different categories and when using predefined thresholds already available in the literature.