How does a typical tutorial for mobile development look like?

Abstract

We report on an exploratory study, which aims at understanding how development tutorials are structured, what types of tutorials exist, and how official tutorials differ from tutorials written by development communities. We analyzed over 1.200 tutorials for mobile application development provided by six different sources for the three major platforms: Android, Apple iOS, and Windows Phone. We found that a typical tutorial contains around 2700 words distributed over 4 pages and including a list of instructions with 18 items. Overall, 70% of the tutorials contain source code examples and a similar fraction contain images. On average, one tutorial has 6 images. When analyzing the images, we found that the studied iOS community posted the largest number of images, 14 images per tutorial, on average, from which 74% are plain images, i.e., mainly screenshots without stencils, diagrams, or highlights. In contrast, 36% of the images included in the official tutorials by Apple were diagrams or images with stencils. Community sites seem to follow a similar structure to the official sites but include items and images which are rather underrepresented in the official tutorials.From the analysis of the tutorials content by means of natural language processing combined with manual content analysis, we derived four categories for mobile development tutorials: infrastructure and design, application and services, distribution and maintenance, and development platform. Our categorization can help tutorial writers to better organize and evaluate the content of their tutorials and identify missing tutorials.

Topic modeling in software engineering research

“…From the 21 exploratory studies, 13 modeled topics from developer communication to identify developers' information needs: 12 analyzed posts on Stack Overflow, a Q&A website for developers (Chatterjee et al 2019;Bajaj et al 2014;Ye et al 2017;Bagherzadeh and Khatchadourian 2019;Ahmed and Bagherzadeh 2018;Barua et al 2014;Rosen and Shihab 2016;Zou et al 2017;Chen et al 2019;Han et al 2020;Abdellatif et al 2020;Haque and Ali Babar 2020) and one paper analyzed blog posts (Pagano and Maalej 2013). Regarding the other eight exploratory studies, three papers investigated web search queries to also identify developers' information needs (Xia et al 2017a;Bajracharya and Lopes 2009;2012); four papers investigated end user documentation to analyse users' feedback on mobile apps (Tiarks and Maalej 2014;El Zarif et al 2020;Noei et al 2018;Hu et al 2018); and one paper investigated historical "bug" reports of NASA systems to extract trends in testing and operational failures (Layman et al 2016).…”

“…-Twelve papers (Bagherzadeh and Khatchadourian 2019;Ahmed and Bagherzadeh 2018;Martin et al 2015;Hindle et al 2013;Pagano and Maalej 2013;Zou et al 2017;Pettinato et al 2019;Layman et al 2016;Ray et al 2014;Tiarks and Maalej 2014;Mezouar et al 2018;Abdellatif et al 2020) acknowledged that how topics were named could be a threat to validity. For example, Layman et al (2016) mentioned that they did not evaluate the accuracy of the manual topic naming, which was based on their expertise.…”

Automatically identifying valid API versions for software development tutorials on the Web

“…Developers commonly use online tutorials to study new or unfamiliar APIs, spending considerable amount of time to follow a tutorial step‐by‐step or to decide exactly which parts of a tutorial are relevant to their ongoing tasks . Expert developers share their procedural or “how to” knowledge, creating new tutorials that support various development activities.…”

“…Expert developers share their procedural or “how to” knowledge, creating new tutorials that support various development activities. Tutorials targeting software development can use various media, taking the form of written documents, interactive programs, or screen recordings . In this research, we only consider written online tutorials available on the Web.…”

Find, understand, and extend development screencasts on YouTube

“…Video content, from movies to webinars and screencasts, accounts for more than half of the internet tra c 1 . So ware developers are concerned with this trend as they are using more and more video resources in their job [10,11].…”