Exploring User Experience of Automatic Documentation Tools

Abstract

Currently, researches about automatic documentation tools seldom pay attention to user experience. In attempt to explore how existing works consider user experience of automatic documentation tools and user experience challenges automatic documentation tools are faced with, we qualitatively analyze evaluation sections in 21 papers. We find (1) User experience of automatic documentation tools is usually considered as the supplementary for document quality. (2) Automatic documentation tools are faced with three user experience challenges. Developers do not trust the generated documents. High expectations towards automatic documentation tools also hurt user experience. How developers work and acquire information presents another challenge to the design of automatic documentation tools. Apart from identifying three user experience related challenges, this paper also benefits none SE professionals who are interested in automatic documentation tools by selecting representative papers and summarizing how evaluations are conducted.