Software documentation and augmented reality: Love or arranged marriage?

Abstract

There is a significant rise in the availability, development and size of software projects in the present day. Many open source projects are reused or updated for various purposes that include fixing bugs in existing projects, development and maintenance of project extensions. Developers who interact with the projects might require documentation for better comprehension of the project and to develop extensions. Most of the software projects currently do not have sufficient documentation or it is not updated along with the project. If some projects have reasonably sufficient documentation, it is usually difficult to comprehend it either for maintenance or for reuse purposes. Considering the usefulness of Augmented Reality (AR) towards comprehension, we propose the vision of integrating the domains of augmented reality and software documentation, and specifically, visualization of software documentation using AR. In this paper, we present some of the directions that could be explored towards this vision and also present an example visualization scenario for API documentation using neural system metaphor. We see this paper as a basis for the future research direction of leveraging AR towards making documentation as a primary artifact in the software development process.