On fuzzy repetitions detection in documentation reuse

Abstract

Increasing complexity of software documentation calls for additional requirements of document maintenance. Documentation reuse can make a considerable contribution to solve this problem. This paper presents a method for fuzzy repetitions search in software documentation that is based on software clone detection. The search results are used for document refactoring. This paper also presents Documentation Refactoring Toolkit implementing the proposed method and integrated with the DocLine project. The proposed approach is evaluated on documentation packages for a number of open-source projects: Linux Kernel, Zend Framework, Subversion, and DocBook.