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Crowdsourcing for API documentation: A Preliminary Investigation

Developers and researchers have been using crowdsourcing in a variety of fields related to software development and software engineering. Crowd based documentation is another yield of crowdsourcing where the coder community or workers document the software. In the present work, we have analyzed how crowdsourcing can be used for an API documentation. The study is based on the fact that good programmers write descriptive variables and method names and continue to do so for future references. A variety of tools such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, ETurk and DocIt were evaluated for the purpose. Among these, DocIt and ETurk were built in-house. The evaluation of the documentation was performed by experienced coders. This is a preliminary experiment which was performed in a controlled environment. Results were encouraging and help us to determine that in future crowd based documentation might help to reduce time to market and improve software quality.