Paper accepted at ICSE 2021

Paper titled "On Indirectly Dependent Documentation in the Context of Code Evolution: A Study" authored by Devika Sondhi, Avyakt Gupta, Salil Purandare, Ankit Rana, Deepanshu Kaushal, and Rahul Purandare has been accepted for publication in the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) 2021. Congratulations to the team!

Abstract: Inconsistent documentation is undesirable, since documentation serves as a useful source of information about the functionality. The paper presents a study on the prevalence of function documentations that are indirectly or implicitly dependent on entities other than the associated function. We observe a substantial presence of such documentations, with 62% of the studied Javadoc comments being dependent on other entities, as studied in 11 open-source repositories implemented in Java. We comprehensively analyze the nature of documentation updates made in 1302 commit logs and study patterns to reason about the cause of dependency in the documentation. Our findings from the observed patterns may be applied to suggest documentations that should be updated on making a change in the repository.