Bart~Blog

Description

Producing usable documentation has always been a tedious task, and even communicating important knowledge about a system among collaborators is difficult. Mismar is an approach and a toolset to creating documentation in the form of guides, which encapsulate passive information about important tasks along with active steps to be followed. The approach is concern-based, and introduces active steps into traditionally passive concerns. A developer can begin by creating a concern that identifies elements of importance in the context of a task, which, we believe, is easier and more natural than trying to formulate a process up front. S/he can then easily create a guide to the task based on this concern, and export it. Other developers can follow the guide, and, as they do so, their results are recorded as examples for future reference.

XFinder is a tool extending Mismar that automatically locates implementation examples given a Mismar guide. The evaluation data are now public.

This is a project I worked on during my first summer internship at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center with my colleague and mentor Harold Ossher.

Status

I am actively working on this project and we hope to be able to release it soon with an academia-friendly license.

Related publications

Tech report to come soon.

Barthélémy Dagenais and Harold Ossher. Mismar: a new approach to developer documentation. In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE’07 Companion), pages 47-48, May 2007. pdf | site

Barthélémy Dagenais and Harold Ossher. Aiding Evolution with Concern-Oriented Guides. In Proceedings of the Linking Aspect Technology and Evolution (LATE) at AOSD, March 2007. pdf | site

Barthélémy Dagenais and Harold Ossher. Guidance Through Active Concerns. In Proceedings of the Eclipse Technology Exchange (ETX) at OOPSLA, pages 60-64, October 2006. pdf | site