Journal's Facebook pageDMOSS: Open Source Software Documentation Assessment
- Department of Informatics
University of Minho
{narcarvalho,jj}@di.uminho.pt - Centre for Humanistic Studies
University of Minho
ambs@ilch.uminho.pt
Abstract
Besides source code, the fundamental source of information about open source software lies in documentation, and other non source code files, like README, INSTALL, or How-To files, commonly available in the software ecosystem. These documents, written in natural language, provide valuable information during the software development stage, but also in future maintenance and evolution tasks. DMOSS3 is a toolkit designed to systematically assess the quality of non source code content found in software packages. The toolkit handles a package as an attribute tree, and performs several tree traverse algorithms through a set of plugins, specialized in retrieving specific metrics from text, gathering information about the software. These metrics are later used to infer knowledge about the software, and composed together to build reports that assess the quality of specific features. This paper discusses the motivations for this work, continues with a description of the toolkit implementation and design goals. This is followed by an example of its usage to process a software package, and the produced report.
Key words
open source, documentation analysis, data mining
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.2298/CSIS131005027C
Publication information
Volume 11, Issue 4 (October 2014)
Special Issue on Advances in Systems, Modeling, Languages and Agents
Year of Publication: 2014
ISSN: 2406-1018 (Online)
Publisher: ComSIS Consortium
Full text
Available in PDF
Portable Document Format
How to cite
Carvalho, N. R., Simões, A., Almeida, J. J.: DMOSS: Open Source Software Documentation Assessment. Computer Science and Information Systems, Vol. 11, No. 4, 1191–1207. (2014), https://doi.org/10.2298/CSIS131005027C
