skip to main content
10.1145/1188835.1188848acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagessplashConference Proceedingsconference-collections
Article

Guidance through active concerns

Published: 22 October 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Producing usable documentation has always been a tedious task, and even communicating important knowledge about a system among collaborators is difficult. This paper describes an approach to creating documentation in the form of guides, which encapsulate passive information about important tasks along with active steps to be followed. The approach is concern-based, and introduces active steps into traditionally passive concerns. A developer can begin by creating a concern that identifies elements of importance in the context of a task, which, we believe, is easier and more natural than trying to formulate a process up front. S/he can then easily create a guide to the task based on this concern, and export it. Other developers can follow the guide, and, as they do so, their results are recorded as examples for future reference. As an early step towards validation, we created a guide for the complex task of creating an Eclipse editor.

References

[1]
Ambler, S. W., "Agile Documentation: Strategies for Agile Software Development." http://www.agilemodeling.com/essays/agileDocumentation.htm
[2]
Bergman, L., Castelli V., Lau T., Oblinger D. "DocWizards: a system for authoring follow-me documentation wizards." In Proceedings of the 18th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, pages 191--200, 2005.
[3]
"Building cheat sheets in Eclipse V3.2." http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-ecl-cheatsheets/
[4]
Eclipse. http://www.eclipse.org/
[5]
Jeteye. http://www.jeteye.com/
[6]
Kersten, M. and Murphy G. C. Mylar: a degree-of-interest model for IDEs. In Proceedings of the 4th Conference on Aspect-Oriented Software Development, pages 159--168, 2005.
[7]
Nykaza, J., Messinger R., Boehme, F. Norman C. L., Mace M., Gordon M. "What programmers really want: results of a needs assessment for SDK documentation." In Proceedings of the 20th annual international conference on Computer documentation. Pages 133--141, 2002.
[8]
Robillard, M. and Weigand-Warr, F. ConcernMapper: Simple View-Based Separation of Scattered Concerns. In Proceedings of the Eclipse Technology Exchange at OOPSLA, 2005.
[9]
Tarr, P., Ossher, H., Harrison, W. and Sutton, Jr., S. M., "N degrees of separation: Multi-dimensional separation of concerns." In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE '99), 107--119, IEEE, May 1999.

Cited By

View all

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences
eclipse '06: Proceedings of the 2006 OOPSLA workshop on eclipse technology eXchange
October 2006
93 pages
ISBN:1595936211
DOI:10.1145/1188835
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

  • IBM: IBM

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 22 October 2006

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. aspect-oriented software development
  2. concern modeling
  3. separation of concerns
  4. user guidance

Qualifiers

  • Article

Acceptance Rates

eclipse '06 Paper Acceptance Rate 17 of 30 submissions, 57%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 38 of 79 submissions, 48%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)1
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 11 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2009)SmartTutorProceedings of the 31st International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE.2009.5070555(559-562)Online publication date: 16-May-2009
  • (2007)Aiding evolution with concern-oriented guidesProceedings of the 3rd workshop on Linking aspect technology and evolution10.1145/1275672.1275676(4-es)Online publication date: 12-Mar-2007
  • (2007)MismarCompanion to the proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSECOMPANION.2007.51(47-48)Online publication date: 20-May-2007
  • (2007)Presentations by Programmers for ProgrammersProceedings of the 29th international conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE.2007.67(788-792)Online publication date: 24-May-2007

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media