# Wait, wasn't that code here before? Detecting Outdated Software Documentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.04291 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04291/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jul 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Agent READMEs: An Empirical Study of Context Files for Agentic Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12884/) (2025)
- [Context Rot in AI-Assisted Software Development: Repurposing Documentation Consistency for AI Configuration Artifacts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09090/) (2026)
- [A GitOps-Driven Annotation Catalog for Fully Automatic Railway Operations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04724/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Encountering outdated documentation is not a rare occurrence for developers and users in the software engineering community. To ensure that software documentation is up-to-date, developers often have to manually check whether the documentation needs to be updated whenever changes are made to the source code. In our previous work, we proposed an approach to automatically detect outdated code element references in software repositories and found that more than a quarter of the 1000 most popular projects on GitHub contained at least one outdated reference. In this paper, we present a GitHub Actions tool that builds on our previous work's approach that GitHub developers can configure to automatically scan for outdated code element references in their GitHub project's documentation whenever a pull request is submitted.