A Field Study of Developer Documentation Format
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Documentation facilitates the transfer of knowledge among programmers and helps them become familiar with new technologies. However, the effectiveness with which a reader can find information in a document depends on its presentation format. In a prior publication, we presented Casdoc, a novel dynamic format for code examples. In this work, we synthesized five documentation presentation guidelines from prior research on programmer information needs and search behaviors. We then used Casdoc as an instrument to evaluate the impact of these guidelines in a field study with 326 students who used 126 documents over several months. Participants overwhelmingly chose to use Casdoc instead of a static baseline format. We observed that interactive documents can contain more information without distracting its readers. We also found some limitations that authors should consider when applying the guidelines, such as the large impact of small differences in visual cues to help readers navigate a document.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it