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Computer-aided documentation

Published: 07 June 1982 Publication History

Abstract

Current standards for high-quality documentation of complex computer systems include many criteria, based on the application and user levels. Important points common to many systems are: targeting to specific user groups; being complete, concise, and structured; containing both tutorials and reference material; being field-tested; and being timely in appearence relative to the software delivery. To achieve these goals, uniform quality standards should be more vigorously applied, the documentation development cycle should be shortened, more documentation/software help should be available on line, and more user interaction should be solicited.
For future computer systems, the proposal is made that the documentation be "machine comprehensible." This should be phased in, with the immediate goal being to facilitate user querying for information, and with an ultimate goal of providing a database for "programmer apprentice" artificial-intelligence programs that assist software development. This new functionality will be the result of several trends, including the drastically reduced cost of read-only online random-access storage via video optical disks, the ongoing successes of artificial-intelligence programs when applied to limited application areas, and the ever increasing cost of software programmers.

References

[1]
Dwyer, Barry. "A User Friendly Algorithm." Communications of the ACM, 24 (1981), pp. 556--561.
[2]
Gass, Saul I., Karla L. Hoffman, Richard H. F. Jackson, Lambert S. Joel, Patsy B. Saunders, "Documentation for a Model: A Hierarchical Approach," Communications of the ACM, 24 (1981), pp. 728--733.
[3]
Waters, Richard C., "The Programmer Apprentice: Knowledge Based Program Editing", IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol. SE-8 (1982), pp. 1--12.

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AFIPS '82: Proceedings of the June 7-10, 1982, national computer conference
June 1982
857 pages
ISBN:088283035X
DOI:10.1145/1500774
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]

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  • AFIPS: American Federation of Information Processing Societies

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 07 June 1982

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