A multimedia documentation environment supports well-engineered software development and maintenance

Abstract

Program documentation is very important to software design, coding, testing and maintenance. A well-designed documentation should reduce the development time and cost, and make the software more reliable and easier to maintain. But current program documentation has a number of drawbacks, such as the incompleteness, inconsistency, traceability problems, no quantitative methods to measure the quality,  and unfriendly  to read and write. These drawbacks cause naďve or maintenance programmers unwilling to read documents, thus hard to understand the program. In this paper, we propose a system entitled DocMetrics, which provides four tools to assist program documentation.  An editor is used to facilitate programmers using multimedia to annotate their program in a different way. A composer constructs the program into a tree, integrates the documents, and measures the completeness of documentation. A browser allows programmers to traverse a program in a hypertext-like way. A navigator helps the project manager to produce a guided tour of the program that can lead naďve or maintenance programmers to traverse and understand the program. The learning status, feedback, and the quality of documentation can be analysed quantitatively.