Linking Usage Tutorials into API Client Code

Traceability links between software artifacts have important applications in the development process. This paper concerns a special case of traceability recovery, i.e., the automated integration of API usage tutorials with the API client code. Our solution involves partitioning the client code into multiple semantic groups/snippets and linking each snippet to the best matching tutorials. Evaluation using benchmarks created for two popular APIs reveals that our solution can find the expected tutorial links at the average rank of 1.6 and 1.4 in the top ranked results, for the two API’s, respectively, and with good average precision and recall. We also evaluate the impact of both method partitioning and JavaDoc query expansion on tutorial linking performance. Lastly, we conduct a formative user study to pinpoint the scenarios where our solution actually helps a software developer. We conclude that it is a promising approach to speeding up the maintenance of API client code.