Reusable software documentation with phrase annotations

摘要

Problem: Reoccurring software documentation fragments called documentation phrases crosscut documenta-tion body and introduce undesired redundancy. The redundancy imposes problems with software documentationdevelopment and evolution.Objective: We want to reduce the negative effect caused by documentation phrases redundancy by centralizingthe documentation phrases sources. This way a documentation phrase will have a single source that can be usedfor maintenance and evolution.Method: We discuss the nature of documentation phrases and argue for the support of their parametrization. Wepresent a new documentation phrase instantiation method based on source code annotations. The provides freeIDE support for writing documentation and is aided by our tool prototype.Results and contributions: Our contributions of this paper include identification of documentation phraseparametrization and the annotation-based documentation phrase instantiation. The annotation-based documen-tation phrase instantiation method enables to reduce the effort needed for documentation development and evo-lution.