Automated documentation of Android apps

Aghajan, Emad; Bavota, Gabriele; Linares-Vásquez, Mario; Lanza, Michele

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Journal article

Automated documentation of Android apps

Aghajan, Emad ORCID Facoltà di scienze informatiche, Università della Svizzera italiana, Svizzera
Bavota, Gabriele ORCID Istituto del software (SI), Facoltà di scienze informatiche, Università della Svizzera italiana, Svizzera
Linares-Vásquez, Mario ORCID Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia
Lanza, Michele ORCID Istituto del software (SI), Facoltà di scienze informatiche, Università della Svizzera italiana, Svizzera

2021

Published in:

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. - 2021, vol. 47, no. 1, p. 204-220

English Developers do not always have the knowledge needed to understand source code and must refer to different resources (e.g., teammates, documentation, the web). This non-trivial process, called program comprehension, is very time-consuming. While many approaches support the comprehension of a given code at hand, they are mostly focused on defining extractive summaries from the code (i.e., on selecting from a given piece of code the most important statements/comments to comprehend it). However, if the information needed to comprehend the code is not there, their usefulness is limited. We present ADANA, an approach to automatically inject comments describing a given piece of Android code. ADANA reuses the descriptions of similar and well-documented code snippets retrieved from various online resources. Our evaluation has shown that ADANA is able to aid the program comprehension process.

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