Automatic Detection of Five API Documentation Smells: Practitioners’ Perspectives

The learning and usage of an API is supported by official documentation. Like source code, API documentation is itself a software product. Several research results show that bad design in API documentation can make the reuse of API features difficult. Indeed, similar to code smells or code anti-patterns, poorly designed API documentation can also exhibit `smells'. Such documentation smells can be described as bad documentation styles that do not necessarily produce an incorrect documentation but nevertheless make the documentation difficult to properly understand and to use. Recent research on API documentation has focused on finding content inaccuracies in API documentation and to complement API documentation with external resources (e.g., crowd-shared code examples). We are aware of no research that focused…