Interactive and collaborative source code annotation

Software documentation plays an important role in sharing the knowledge behind source code between distributed programmers. Good documentation makes source code easier to understand; on the other hand, developers have to constantly update the documentation whenever the source code changes. Developers will benefit from an automated tool that simplifies keeping documentation up-to-date and facilitates collaborative editing. In this paper, we explore the concept of collaborative code annotation by combining the idea from crowdsourcing. We introduce Cumiki, a web-based collaborative annotation tool that makes it easier for crowds of developers to collaboratively create the up-to-date documentation. This paper describes the user interface, the mechanism, and its implementation, and discusses the possible usage scenarios.