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Modern software development requires developers to find and effectively utilize new APIs and their documentation, but documentation has many well-known issues. Despite this, developers eventually overcome these issues but have no way of sharing what they learned. We investigate sharing this documentation-specific information through annotations, which have advantages over developer forums as the information is contextualized, not disruptive, and is short, thus easy to author. Developers can also author annotations to support their own comprehension. In order to support the documentation usage behaviors we found, we built the Adamite annotation tool, which provides features such as multiple anchors, annotation types, and pinning. In our user study, we found that developers are able to create annotations that are useful to themselves and are able to utilize annotations created by other developers when learning a new API, with readers of the annotations completing 67% more of the task, on average, than the baseline. 

Previous research has revealed that newcomer women are disproportionately affected by gender-biased barriers in open source software (OSS) projects. However, this research has focused mainly on social/cultural factors, neglecting the software tools and infrastructure. To shed light on how OSS tools and infrastructure might factor into OSS barriers to entry, we conducted two studies: (1) a field study with five teams of software professionals, who worked through five use cases to analyze the tools and infrastructure used in their OSS projects; and (2) a diary study with 22 newcomers (9 women and 13 men) to investigate whether the barriers matched the ones identified by the software professionals. The field study produced a bleak result: software professionals found gender biases in 73% of all the newcomer barriers they identified. Further, the diary study confirmed these results: Women newcomers encountered gender biases in 63% of barriers they faced. Fortunately, many the kinds of barriers and biases revealed in these studies could potentially be ameliorated through changes to the OSS software environments and tool.