A multimedia documentation environment supports well-engineered software development and maintenance

Program documentation is very important to software design, coding, testing and maintenance. A well-designed documentation should reduce the developme nt time and cost, and make the software more reliable and easier to maintai n. But current program documentation has a number of drawbacks, such as the incompleteness, inconsistency, traceability problems, no quantitative meth ods to measure the quality, and unfriendly to read and write. These drawbac ks cause naive or maintenance programmers unwilling to read documents, thus hard to understand the program. In this paper, we propose a system entitle d DocMetrics, which provides four tools to assist program documentation. An editor is used to facilitate programmers using multimedia to annotate thei r programs in a different way. A composer constructs the program into a tre e, integrates the documents, and measures the completeness of documentation . A browser allows programmers to traverse a program in a hypertext-like wa y. A navigator helps the project manager to produce a guided tour of the pr ogram that can lead naive or maintenance programmers to traverse and unders tand the program. The learning status, feedback, and the quality of documen tation can be analyzed quantitatively.