How Programmers Interact with Multimodal Software Documentation

There is a wide variety of online documentation to learn about a given software technology, and prior research has reported that programmers must invest time and effort to identify one that best suits their need. We evaluated five modalities to present information that enable a software document to cater to the different presentation needs of programmers. We developed a prototype tutorial with these modalities on three topics in Java, namely, regular expressions, inheritance, and exception handling. We investigated how people interact with the modalities in the tutorial given a programming topic and a type of task. We conducted a survey study with 56 respondents and confirm that although text content is most useful for solving conceptual tasks, code examples support deeper comprehension of the underlying concepts. Furthermore, we report that respondents' contradicting preferences for the modalities suggest the need to have multiple alternatives in a software tutorial.