Section: New Results

Human-Competitive Software Engineering

Frequently asked questions (FAQs) are a popular way to document software development knowledge. As creating such documents is expensive, we have invented an approach for automatically extracting FAQs from sources of software development discussion, such as mailing lists and Internet forums, by combining techniques of text mining and natural language processing. We applied the approach to popular mailing lists and carried out a survey among software developers to show that it is able to extract high-quality FAQs that may be further improved by experts. This research has been published at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'2012 [40] ), the flagship conference in the domain. This work takes place in our line of research on "human competitive software engineering", where we try to replace manual tasks requiring costly human skills (such as documentation writing or bug fixing) by automated or semi-automated approaches.