Automated user documentation generation based on the Eclipse application model
This addresses the lack of tools for generating user manuals for end-users in graphical applications, though it is incremental as it builds on existing Eclipse platform capabilities.
The paper tackled the problem of automatically generating user documentation for modern graphical applications by leveraging the Eclipse application model to bridge the semantic gap between code and interface, resulting in well-structured documentation compliant with ISO/IEC 26514 standards.
An application's user documentation, also referred to as the user manual, is one of the core elements required in application distribution. While there exist many tools to aid an application's developer in creating and maintaining documentation on and for the code itself, there are no tools that complement code development with user documentation for modern graphical applications. Approaches like literate programming are not applicable to this scenario, as not a library, but a full application is to be documented to an end-user. Documentation generation on applications up to now was only partially feasible due to the gap between the code and its semantics. The new generation of Eclipse rich client platform developed applications is based on an application model, closing a broad semantic gap between code and visible interface. We use this application model to provide a semantic description for the contained elements. Combined with the internal relationships of the application model, these semantic descriptions are aggregated to well-structured user documentations that comply to the ISO/IEC 26514. This paper delivers a report on the Ecrit research project, where the potentials and limitations of user documentation generation based on the Eclipse application model were investigated.