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Developers May Be Getting 50% of Their Documentation From Stack Overflow

Posted by Soulskill on from the not-half-bad dept.

New submitter gameweld writes "Software companies, such as Microsoft, create documentation for millions of topics concerning its APIs, services, and software platforms. Creating this documentation comes at a considerable cost and effort. And after all this effort, much documentation is rarely consulted (citation) and lacking enough examples (citation). A new study suggests that developers are increasingly consulting Stack Overflow and crowd-sourced sites over official documentation, using it as much as 50% of time. How should official documentation be better redesigned? What are the implications of software created from unruly mashups?"

6 of 418 comments (clear)

  1. Documentation Shitty so Developers Turn to Web by TheSpoom · · Score: 5, Funny

    News at eleven.

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    1. Re:Documentation Shitty so Developers Turn to Web by Joce640k · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yep. Microsoft documentation is truly awful.

      Typical Microsoft documentation page:

      DWORD throbTheWangle(DWORD Wangle, FLOAT HowMuch)

      Description:
      This function throbs wangles.

      Input parameters:
      Wangle - the wangle to be throbbed.
      HowMuch - how much to throb it

      Return value:
      The function returns a status code indicating success or failure.

      If you want to know what wangles are, what throbbing is, the valid range of "HowMuch", what the returned status codes are... well, you're off to StackExchange to see if anybody's managed to figure it out.

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  2. Re:Astroturfing Detected by binarylarry · · Score: 5, Funny

    Don't worry, he's just making sure none of us get Scroogled.

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  3. How... by Ghostworks · · Score: 3, Funny

    How should official documentation be better redesigned?

    It should exist.

  4. Re:Astroturfing Detected by Frnknstn · · Score: 3, Funny

    That kind of depends on what help you need. For example, if you are looking for some facial feminisation surgery, you may find what you need at expertsexchange.com.

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  5. Re:What would I do without the web? by fritsd · · Score: 5, Funny

    [This page intentionally left blank.]

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