Use-Case-Specific Source-Code Documentation for Feature-Oriented Programming

Abstract

Source-code documentation is essential to efficiently develop and maintain large software products. Documentation is equally important for software product lines (SPLs), which represent a set of different products with a common code base. Unfortunately, proper support for documenting the source code of an SPL is currently lacking, because source code variability is not considered by current documentation tools. We introduce a method to provide source-code documentation for feature-oriented programming and aim to support developers who implement, maintain, and use SPLs. We identify multiple use cases for developers working with SPLs and propose four different documentation types (meta, product, feature, and context) that fulfill the information requirements of these use cases. Furthermore, we design an algorithm that enables developers to create tailor-made documentation for each use case. Our method is based on the documentation tool Javadoc and allows developers to easily write documentation comments that contain little overhead or redundancy. To demonstrate the efficiency of our method, we present a prototypical implementation and evaluate our method with regard to documentation effort for the SPL developers by documenting two small SPLs.