Aiding evolution with concern-oriented guides

Abstract

Program documentation is often incomplete and out of date due to its tediousness and perceived low value. This requires evolution tasks to be preceded by time-consuming exploration. In this paper, we explore a concern-oriented approach to documentation that focuses on the code artifacts and their relationships to make the process of creating and using program documentation more efficient. As opposed to traditional documents or tutorials, guides created using this approach are interactive, almost wordless and automatically maintain implementation examples. We also present the rationale and the architecture of Mismar, a toolset tightly integrated in the Eclipse environment and implementing this approach. Moreover, since program documentation involves different artifact types, Mismar was build from the ground up to be extensible, and to support artifacts written in multiple languages or modeling approaches. Copyright 2007 ACM.