Malleable Interfaces for Reviewing Software Documentation

Abstract

Research on documentation quality has examined developers and software artifacts but overlooked technical writers, the dedicated practitioners who synthesize distributed software knowledge into documentation. By interviewing 31 technical writers, we found that documentation quality is facilitated by a review process in which practitioners with different expertise evaluate against distinct quality criteria over multiple stages. This process lacks dedicated tooling, forcing documentation teams to adopt developer-focused platforms like GitHub and leaving non-technical reviewers to resort to alternative tools, resulting in feedback scattered across platforms. This thesis proposes malleable interfaces for documentation review, where practitioners reshape interfaces to fit their work rather than adapting to fixed tool interfaces. We propose to build a review environment where practitioners describe interface needs in natural language, and the system generates views to accommodate diverse expertise and surface information relevant to their roles. We plan two evaluation studies: examining how individuals articulate and use generated interfaces, then how practitioners with different roles collaborate using them. This work contributes toward a vision of software tooling that practitioners can shape to fit their needs.