一句话：挖掘四类来源的878条文档相关记录，构建软件文档问题分类学并提出可操作建议。
软件文档对开发者与用户理解系统的功能、运行方式和用法至关重要，但从技术文档到用户手册，其创建与维护常被忽视，导致质量与实用性下降，进而使人们对文档产生普遍负面印象。已有研究主要依赖对开发者的问卷调查来考察文档问题，这种视角天然存在偏差。本文开展大规模实证研究，从邮件列表、Stack Overflow 讨论、issue 仓库和 pull request 四类来源中挖掘、分析并归类了 878 条与文档相关的工件。研究最终得到一份详细的文档问题分类学（taxonomy），并据此为研究人员和从业者提炼出一系列可操作的建议，帮助更系统地理解与改进软件文档实践。
(Good) Software documentation provides developers and users with a description of what a software system does, how it operates, and how it should be used. For example, technical documentation (e.g., an API reference guide) aids developers during evolution/maintenance activities, while a user manual explains how users are to interact with a system. Despite its intrinsic value, the creation and the maintenance of documentation is often neglected, negatively impacting its quality and usefulness, ultimately leading to a generally unfavourable take on documentation. Previous studies investigating documentation issues have been based on surveying developers, which naturally leads to a somewhat biased view of problems affecting documentation. We present a large scale empirical study, where we mined, analyzed, and categorized 878 documentation-related artifacts stemming from four different sources, namely mailing lists, Stack Overflow discussions, issue repositories, and pull requests. The result is a detailed taxonomy of documentation issues from which we infer a series of actionable proposals both for researchers and practitioners.
@inproceedings{AghajaniNVLMBL19,
title = {Software Documentation Issues Unveiled},
author = {Emad Aghajani and Csaba Nagy and Olga Lucero Vega-Marquez and Mario Linares-Vasquez and Laura Moreno and Gabriele Bavota and Michele Lanza},
booktitle = {ICSE},
year = {2019},
doi = {10.1109/icse.2019.00122}
}