Bibliographic record
Abstract
The documentation of software libraries is an essential resource for learning how to use the library. Bad documentation may demotivate a developer from using the library or may result in incorrect usage of the library. Therefore, as developers select which libraries to use and learn, it would be beneficial to know the quality of the available documentation. In this paper, we follow a systematic process to create an automatic documentation quality evaluation tool. We identify several documentation quality aspects from the literature and design metrics that measure these aspects. We design a documentation quality overview visualization to visualize and present these metrics, and receive intermediate feedback through a focused interview study. Based on the received feedback, we implement a prototype for a web service that can evaluate a given documentation page for Java, JavaScript, and Python libraries. We use this web service to conduct a survey with 26 developers where we evaluate the usefulness of our metrics as well as whether they reflect developers’ experiences when using this library. Our results show that participants rated most of our metrics highly, with Text Readability, and Code Readability (of examples) receiving the highest ratings. We also found several libraries where our evaluation reflected developers’ experiences using the library, indicating the accuracy of our metrics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.044 | 0.205 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".