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Document Type

Article

Abstract

Readme file is a short document associated with most open source software (OSS), it provides useful information about the software. Software developers use different structure when documenting their software, accordingly there were many attempts to uniform the structure of readme file as this file is the main file most user read and help the user to decide upon using the software or not .In this paper we suggest using audio format for readme file (ListenToMe) to do so we used 100 GitHub repositories as a dataset. Extracting commits from it results in 326793 messages. Next, commits regarding documentation have been isolated for further analysis. Finally, we observe the structure of readme file and the number of key attributes used. The result shows that Github developers did not committee to the general Readme file structure suggested by literature[17]. Most developers will not save time to write documentation, thus we suggest an audio version of Readme file. Also structures for the ListentoMe file have been proposed to bridge the gap in documentation structures. To evaluate our suggestion, we conduct aquestionnaire targeting software developers in GitHub for feedbacks. The questionnaire results shows that more than 70% of developers prefer ListentoMe (audio version of ReadMe) , they mostly agreed about the suggested ListentoMe structure.

Keywords

OSS, Open source software, Readme, Documentation, Documentation structure

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