Documentation generator

A documentation generator is a programming tool that generates software documentation intended for programmers (API documentation) or end users (end-user guide), or both, from a set of source code files, and in some cases, binary files. Some generators, such as Doxygen or Javadoc, use special comments to drive the generation.

Types of generation

Document generation can be divided in several types:

Batch generation (generic technique)
Text block correspondence (documents created based on pre-defined text blocks)
Forms (forms for websites)
Documentation synthesis:
- Documentation can be inferred from code^[1]
- Documentation can be inferred from execution traces^[2]
- Documentation can be inferred from mailing lists^[3]

Some integrated development environments provide interactive access to documentation, code metadata, etc.

^ Bruch, Marcel; Mezini, Mira; Monperrus, Martin (2010). "Mining subclassing directives to improve framework reuse". 2010 7th IEEE Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2010). pp. 141–150. doi:10.1109/MSR.2010.5463347. ISBN 978-1-4244-6802-7.
^ Zhang, Sai; Zhang, Cheng; Ernst, Michael (2011). "Automated documentation inference to explain failed tests" (PDF). 2011 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2011). pp. 63–72. doi:10.1109/ASE.2011.6100145. ISBN 978-1-4577-1639-3.
^ Hens, Stefan; Monperrus, Martin; Mezini, Mira (2012). "Semi-automatically extracting FAQs to improve accessibility of software development knowledge". 2012 34th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). pp. 793–803. arXiv:1203.5188. doi:10.1109/ICSE.2012.6227139. ISBN 978-1-4673-1067-3.