TaskNav: Task-Based Navigation of Software Documentation

To help developers navigate documentation, we introduce Task Nav, a tool that automatically discovers and indexes task descriptions in software documentation. With Task Nav, we conceptualize tasks as specific programming actions that have been described in the documentation. Task Nav presents these extracted task descriptions along with concepts, code elements, and section headers in an auto-complete search interface. Our preliminary evaluation indicates that search results identified through extracted task descriptions are more helpful to developers than those found through other means, and that they help bridge the gap between documentation structure and the information needs of software developers. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opnGYmMGnqY.

I. Introduction and Motivation

Software documentation is disseminated in many different forms, written by different individuals for different purposes [16]. While the emergence of social media has promoted the availability of software documentation for a wide variety of topics [13], there is often a mismatch between the needs of documentation users and the knowledge provided by documentation writers. Although documentation often follows a hierarchical structure with sections and subsections, this organization can only enable effective documentation use if section headers are adequate cues for the information needs of the users.