Automatic documentation generation from source code

Abstract

Many systems lack robust documentation because writing documentation comes at a cost for developers and offers little immediate benefits. To motivate developers to write more documentation, we need a framework that beneficially incorporates documentation into the functionalities of the codebase. We explored this idea in the context of Exhibit, a data publishing framework developed at MIT CSAIL's Haystack group. Exhibit enables those without much programming experience to create data-rich interactive webpages. We created an automatic documentation system with an approach that motives the creation of rich specifications by developers, which leads to good documentation. The code required for documentation benefits developers by simplifying the codebase and providing fault tolerance through a modular error checking mechanism. This system intends to aid new and returning users of Exhibit in learning the Exhibit syntax and in creating their Exhibits by providing extensive, up-to-date documentation for all the available views and facets in Exhibit along with an interactive example component. The interactive example component provides an interface that allows users to experiment with combinations of the different settings and also aids developers during the unit testing process.