1

Overthrowing the Tyranny of Alphabetical Ordering in Documentation Systems

Boris Spasojevic, Mircea Lungu, Oscar Nierstrasz!Software Composition Group, University of Bern

–Jakob Nielsen

“Alphabetical ordering must (mostly) die.”

2

3

4

The Refactoring Browser

5

6

once in every ten years ten times every hour (?)7

We wanted to reclaim !the time wasted in browsing through

alphabetically sorted methods…

8http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs14/f/2007/074/5/6/The_tick_tock_man_by_Phostex.jpg

If we knew what methods developers are looking for, we

could improve the documentation accordingly.

9

Usage of java.lang.Thread in !Qualitas Corpus

https://github.com/caracciolo/pangea/blob/master/demo/thread-stats.st10

Pangea streamlines studies!on multi-language corpora.

Introduced in !our SCAM 2014 paper.

people fear change

11http://www.qvidian.com/sites/default/files/Resist-Change_0.jpg

The Refactoring BrowserAugmenting

http://scg.unibe.ch/research/freq12

JavaDoc in ChromeAugmenting

https://github.com/cederigo/jatis13

14

Java Crawler

Smalltalk Crawler

Data Gathering

Module

DatabaseREST API

15

def importance(word, frequency_list): if word in frequency_list: position = frequency_list.index(word) return position else:

Dynamically typed languages pose extra challenges

Smalltalk Crawler

Mining the Ecosystem to Improve Type Inference For Dynamically Typed Languages. Boris Spasojević, Mircea Lungu, and Oscar Nierstrasz. In Onward! ’14, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2014.

As a warrant that the approach works, we provide our own testimonials. (For now.) !We are still working on…!- Extending to classes /

Packages - Improving the type

inference for ST - Alternative orderings

https://github.com/cederigo/jatishttp://scg.unibe.ch/research/freq

More details !in the paper