Title:	Automatically generating software documentation from existing sources

Abstract:
========

Program comprehension is a fundamental activity during software
maintenance and evolution, accounting for almost half of the resources
invested in software change.  Together with the source code, software
documentation is a critical resource when comprehending a software
system.  Documentation, however, is far from ideal--more often than
not, documentation is missing or it is outdated, it is difficult to
access, and it lacks of standard format.

This talk will give an overview of my research on supporting
developers during software (re)documentation through automatic
summarization of various software artifacts. This work includes: the
automatic summarization of classes in Object-Oriented systems, the
automatic generation of release notes, and mining method API usage
examples from existing software. The talk will primarily focus on the
automatic generation of release notes, which are complex software
artifacts that summarize the changes that occurred between two
versions of a software system. I will discuss the different challenges
of creating release notes and how my research work addressed them by
integrating static code analysis, software summarization, and mining
software repositories techniques. The empirical validation of the
approach will also be presented. Finally, I will present future
directions on the automatic software (re)documentation research.