2014/05/20 by Stefan Endrikat, Stefan Hanenberg, Romain Robbes +1 · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Software Engineering Research #Advanced Software Engineering Methodologies #Software Engineering Techniques and Practices
paper · doi:10.1145/2568225.2568299
openalex publication_date 2014/05/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
When developers use Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), they often rely on documentation to assist their tasks. In previous studies, we reported evidence indicating that static type systems acted as a form of implicit documentation, benefiting developer productivity. Such implicit documentation is easier to maintain, given it is enforced by the compiler, but previous experiments tested users without any explicit documentation. In this paper, we report on a controlled experiment and an exploratory study comparing the impact of using documentation and a static or dynamic type system on a development task. Results of our study both confirm previous findings and show that the benefits of static typing are strengthened with explicit documentation, but that this was not as strongly felt with dynamically typed languages.