A Topic Modeling Based Solution for Confirming Software Documentation Quality

this paper presents an approach for evaluating and confirming the quality of the external software documentation using topic modeling. Typically, the quality of the external documentation has to mirror precisely the organization of the source code. Therefore, the elements of such documentation should be strongly written, associated, and presented. In this paper, we use Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and HELLINGER DISTANCE to compute the similarities between the fragments of source code and the external documentation topics. These similarities are used in this paper to improve and advance the existing external documentation. Furthermore, these similarities can also be used for evaluating the new documenting process during the evolution phase of the software. The results show that the new approach yields state-of-the-art performance in evaluating and confirming the existing external documentations quality and superiority.