Abstract
Reverse engineering-based documentation generation extracts facts from software artefacts to generate suitable representations in another level of abstraction. Although the tool perspective in documentation generation has been studied before by many others, these studies mostly report on constructive aspects from case studies, e.g. how tools are built and evaluated. However, we believe a long-term perspective is important to cover issues that arise after initial deployment of a tool.
In this paper, we present challenges and observations made during prototyping, development and maintenance of a documentation generator in an applied research project. Insights are drawn from different project phases over a period of 4-years and cover topics related to tool implementation as well as topics related to knowledge transfer in an applied research project. A key observation is that the maintenance of the system to be documented often triggers maintenance effort on the documentation generator.
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Acknowledgements
The research reported in this paper has been supported by the Austrian ministries BMVIT and BMDW, and the Province of Upper Austria in terms of the COMET - Competence Centers for Excellent Technologies Programme managed by FFG.
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Dorninger, B., Moser, M., Pichler, J., Rappl, M., Sautter, J. (2022). On the Creation and Maintenance of a Documentation Generator in an Applied Research Context. In: Kotsis, G., et al. Database and Expert Systems Applications - DEXA 2022 Workshops. DEXA 2022. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1633. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14343-4_13
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