Task-Driven Software Summarization

Dave W. Binkley, Dawn J. Lawrie, Emily Hill, Janet E. Burge, Ian G. Harris, Regina Hebig, Oliver Keszöcze, Karl Reed, John Slankas

Abstract: There is a growing interest in software summarization and tools for automatically producing summaries. Discussions of relevant papers at recent conferences led to the observation that software summarization needs to consider migrating away from ``is this a good summary?" and towards ``is this a useful summary?" As a result, it has been suggested that to judge usefulness, one needs to view the summary through the lens of a particular task. A preliminary investigation of this suggestion was undertaken at the 2013 ICSE workshop NaturaLiSE. Initial results and lessons learned from this investigation support the notion that task plays a significant role and thus should be considered by researchers building and accessing automatic software summarization tools.