A Study of Demand-Driven Documentation in Two Open Source Projects

We investigate how demand-driven documentation is used by open source projects. Our study relies on questions and answers (i.e., Demand-driven documentation) posted to Stack Overflow and focuses on two projects: Apache POI and Fennec (Firefox for Android). We find that the demand-driven documentation provided by respective community is of good quality and contributions are made within an acceptable amount of time. We conclude that demand-driven documentation can be suitable as a primary information source if other resources accompany it, e.g., Websites. However, the suitability is closely related to size and activity of the project´s community. We also investigate whether the type of project (e.g., API, application, product, etc.) matters, and find that given the nature of a forum, projects where the intended users are developers have larger and more active communities and are thus better suited for demand-driven documentation.