GeekyNote: A Technical Documentation Tool with Coverage, Backtracking, Traces, and Couplings

Abstract

Understanding an unfamiliar program is always a daunting task for any programmer, either experienced or inexperienced. Many studies have shown that even an experienced programmer who is already familiar with the code may still need to rediscover the code frequently during software maintenance. The difficulties of program comprehension is much more intense when a system is completely new. One well-known solution to this notorious problem is to create effective technical documentation to make up for the lack of knowledge.The purpose of technical documentation is to achieve the transfer of knowledge. However, creating effective technical documentation has been impeded by many problems in practice [1]. In this paper, we propose a novel tool called GeekyNote to address the major challenges in technical documentation. The key ideas GeekyNote proposes are: (1) documents are annotated to versioned source code transparently; (2) formal textual writings are discouraged and screencasts (or other forms of documents) are encouraged; (3) the up-to-dateness between documents and code can be detected, measured, and managed; (4) the documentation that works like a debugging-trace is supported; (5) couplings can be easily created and managed for future maintenance needs; (6) how good a system is documented can be measured. A demo video can be accessed at https://youtu.be/cBueuPVDgWM.