Software documentation

Abstract

The main objective of my thesis is to generate a user manual that would be very much comprehensible at the same time well structured and would act as an effective navigator. Documentation is mainly requisite for better communication among the different members of a software development team, such as designers of finer grained components, builders of interfacing system, implementers, testers, performance engineers, technical managers, analysts, quality specialists. In order to develop a very comprehensive documentation there are certain conventions that are requisite to be taken care of. Those conventions and rules have been high lighted extensively. There are different types of documentation based on the requirements of each individual associated with the software development life cycle and they are design, code, user, architectural, trade study and marketing are few to mention. However, my focus area is user documentation. Unlike code documents, user documents are usually far divorced from the source code of the program, and instead simply describe how it is used. The use of XML and Docbook is there. DocBook simply provides a framework. All the presentation issues are devolved to style sheets.