Documentation generator

A documentation generator is a programming tool that generates software documentation intended for programmers (API documentation) or end users (end-user guide), or both, from a set of source code files, and in some cases, binary files. Some generators, such Javadoc, can use special comments to drive the generation. Doxygen is an example of a generator that can use all of these methods.

Types of generation

Document generation can be divided in several types:

Batch generation (generic technique)
Text block correspondence (documents created based on pre-defined text blocks)
Forms (forms for websites)
Documentation synthesis:
- Documentation can be inferred from code^[1]
- Documentation can be inferred from execution traces^[2]
- Documentation can be inferred from mailing lists^[3]

Some integrated development environments provide interactive access to documentation, code metadata, etc.

References

^ Bruch, Marcel; Mezini, Mira; Monperrus, Martin (2010). "Mining subclassing directives to improve framework reuse". 2010 7th IEEE Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2010). pp. 141–150. doi:10.1109/MSR.2010.5463347. ISBN 978-1-4244-6802-7.
^ Zhang, Sai; Zhang, Cheng; Ernst, Michael (2011). "Automated documentation inference to explain failed tests" (PDF). 2011 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2011). pp. 63–72. doi:10.1109/ASE.2011.6100145. ISBN 978-1-4577-1639-3.
^ Hens, Stefan; Monperrus, Martin; Mezini, Mira (2012). "Semi-automatically extracting FAQs to improve accessibility of software development knowledge". 2012 34th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). pp. 793–803. arXiv:. doi:10.1109/ICSE.2012.6227139. ISBN 978-1-4673-1067-3.

Documentation generator

Types of generation

References

See also