Summarizing Software API Usage Examples Using Clustering Techniques

Nikolaos Katirtzis, Themistoklis Diamantopoulos, Charles Sutton

Abstract: As developers often use third-party libraries to facilitate software development, the lack of proper API documentation for these libraries undermines their reuse potential. And although several approaches extract usage examples for libraries, they are usually tied to specific language implementations, while their produced examples are often redundant and are not presented as concise and readable snippets. In this work, we propose a novel approach that extracts API call sequences from client source code and clusters them to produce a diverse set of source code snippets that effectively covers the target API. We further construct a summarization algorithm to present concise and readable snippets to the users. Upon evaluating our system on software libraries, we indicate that it achieves high coverage in API methods, while the produced snippets are of high quality and closely match handwritten examples.