Automation for the people: Pushbutton documentation
Automate the generation of your developer and user documentation
For
developers, creating documentation for any software project can be a
tedious and lengthy task. But imagine if the documentation could be
produced at the click of a button. In the latest installment of Automation for the people, Stelligent CTO, Paul Duvall, illustrates how you can automate the generation of Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams, build figures, entity-relationship diagrams, and even user documentation using various open source tools.
Published by the popular IBM developerWorks, the article, "Pushbutton documentation" demonstrates several effective ways to automatically generate documentation:
- Generating UML diagrams based on the current source code, using UMLGraph.
- Creating entity-relationship diagrams (ERDs) to document the tables and relationships in a database, using SchemaSpy.
- Producing build diagrams of Ant build targets and their relationships, using Grand.
- Spawning source-code documentation, using Doxygen.
- Making the user documentation, using DocBook.
The "Automation for the people"
series is dedicated to exploring the practical uses of automating
software development processes and teaching you when and how to apply
automation successfully. Also, check out developerWorks' "Improve Your Java Code Quality" discussion forum for topics addressing best practices for ensuring your code is the best it can be.
|
