Effective system documentation is a crucial part of a management information system. Yet, it is common to witness users struggling with a system that has incomplete or lost documentation. This is a result of systems...
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Effective system documentation is a crucial part of a management information system. Yet, it is common to witness users struggling with a system that has incomplete or lost documentation. This is a result of systems analysts: 1. feeling that there is no time even to begin documenting, 2. preferring to do more desirable or rewarding tasks, or 3. simply being concerned that their documentation of an inherited system might be incorrect. To overcome these barriers to good documentation, FOLKLORE was developed from methods used in gathering traditional folklore and is now implemented at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The model for FOLKLORE, its costs, and examples from FOLKLORE documents are presented. FOLKLORE has 3 advantages: 1. It allows documentation to evolve. 2. Users and analysts feel that documentation is easier. 3. Those concerned about documentation can contribute without fear of being found incorrect. FOLKLORE is successful in that it was accepted and chosen by users and other systems analysts in a relatively short time.
The main concepts and scientific achievements in program transformations are considered. The use of these achievements in professional activity (in the development of optimizing parallelizing compilers and in higher e...
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The main concepts and scientific achievements in program transformations are considered. The use of these achievements in professional activity (in the development of optimizing parallelizing compilers and in higher education) is considered, and the main problems arising here are analyzed. The concept of controlling information on program transformations within a specialized knowledge base on transformations of computer programs in support of scientific research, education, and profess activity in this domain is proposed. Problems solved by the knowledge base are formulated.
Modern programs make extensive use of reusable software libraries. For example, we found that 17 percent to 30 percent of the classes in a number of large Java applications use the container classes from the java. uti...
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Modern programs make extensive use of reusable software libraries. For example, we found that 17 percent to 30 percent of the classes in a number of large Java applications use the container classes from the java. util package. Given this extensive code reuse in Java programs, it is important for the reusable interfaces to have clear and unambiguous documentation. Unfortunately, most documentation is expressed in English and, therefore, does not always satisfy these requirements. Worse yet, there is no way of checking that the documentation is consistent with the associated code. Formal specifications present an alternative that does not suffer from these problems;however, formal specifications are notoriously hard to write. To alleviate this difficulty, we have implemented a tool that automatically derives documentation in the form of formal specifications. Our tool probes Java classes by invoking them on dynamically generated tests and captures the information observed during their execution as algebraic axioms. Although the tool is not complete or correct from a formal perspective, we demonstrate that it discovers many useful axioms when applied to container classes. These axioms then form an initial formal documentation of the class they describe.
The author documents the lessons he learned while working as an intern at a growing telecommunications company. Though his conclusions are not surprising, they can serve as reminders of how common certain problems are...
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The author documents the lessons he learned while working as an intern at a growing telecommunications company. Though his conclusions are not surprising, they can serve as reminders of how common certain problems are in the software industry and how important basic practices can be.
作者:
Zacklad, ManuelUTT
CNRS-Charles Delaunay Institute Tech-CICO Lab. 12 rue marie curie Troyes Cedex France
In this paper, we focus on situations where documents serve to coordinate the work of a distributed collective engaged in common goal-directed activities. After defining the concept of semiotic products as resulting f...
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We propose a set of criteria for facilitating the rigorous understanding of code components via documentation and evaluate existing notations and approaches with respect to these criteria. We present an overview of an...
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We propose a set of criteria for facilitating the rigorous understanding of code components via documentation and evaluate existing notations and approaches with respect to these criteria. We present an overview of an analysis approach designed to generate program documentation that satisfies these criteria. Because of the inherent difficulty and importance of reasoning about loops, we focus on understanding and documenting loops. We decompose loops into their component parts and obtain formal specifications of the resulting loop fragments by use of a knowledge base. We build this knowledge base for a specific application domain by designing plans that allow us to recognize stereotyped code patterns and associate them with their formal specifications. Finally, we synthesize a consistent and accurate specification of the whole loop construct from the specifications of its fragments. To evaluate our loop analysis approach, a case study was performed on a preexisting program of reasonable size. Results concerning the analyzed loops and the plans designed for them are given. To generate formal documentation of complete program modules, we briefly describe how to integrate our loop analysis approach with an existing program analysis tool, FSQ(2), which uses user-supplied loop specifications.
This article pursues a two-fold goal. First we introduce degree of goal directedness (DGD), a novel quantitative dimension for the taxonomy of navigation tasks in general. As an attempt to operationalize the DGD conce...
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This paper presents an algebraic approach to the generation of tools that produce typographically effective presentations of computer programs. A specification of a formatter is generated from the context-free grammar...
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This paper presents an algebraic approach to the generation of tools that produce typographically effective presentations of computer programs. A specification of a formatter is generated from the context-free grammar of a (programming) language. These generated formatters translate abstract syntax trees of programs into box expressions. Box expressions are translated by language-independent interpreters of the box language into ASCII or TEX. The formatting rules that are generated can easily be tuned in order to get the desired formatting of programs. This is demonstrated by means of real-life applications. Furthermore, a practical solution given for the problem of formatting comments, which occur in the original text.
A systematic effort is made to take a program with no supporting documentation other than the source code and understand it to the point of being able to specify all its functions and modify it where necessary. The ef...
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A systematic effort is made to take a program with no supporting documentation other than the source code and understand it to the point of being able to specify all its functions and modify it where necessary. The effort was undertaken as an exercise simulating the work of a maintenance programmer. The systematic process consists of reducing the program to small prime programs, and then building up from these primes to the functions they produce, combining them at ever higher levels until full specification is achieved. The experimenters speculate that it would have taken a maintenance programmer versed in this process several weeks to develop and document a thorough understanding of the program. The program used in the exercise was a Fortran program claimed to find the zero of a function given by a Fortran subroutine. Figures.
For most of the technical writing community, task-based documentation has become the panacea for presentation of end-product document (in any of its myriad forms including traditional linear manuals and online help). ...
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ISBN:
(纸本)1891709178
For most of the technical writing community, task-based documentation has become the panacea for presentation of end-product document (in any of its myriad forms including traditional linear manuals and online help). We believe, however, that applying this method to a complex tool, (for example, a software tool without a Graphical User Interface), challenges the task-based approach. In this paper, we examine the scalability of the task-based approach vis-a-vis a complex tool, examine the unique challenges of documenting a complex tool, and suggest methods technical writer can consider when deciding their documentation approach.
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