Documentu: a flexible architecture for documentation production based on a reverse-engineering strategy

Good documentation is essential to the production and evolution of quality software. Based on a survey on program documentation, we propose a documentation architecture that aims to fulfil several requirements of an ideal solution. The architecture integrates a powerful transformation system (Draco-PUC) and a versatile CASE tool (Talisman) in order to produce documents using reverse-engineering strategies. We have implemented such an approach in a prototype tool called Documentu, which uses a database to store system-wide information and uses a standard HTML hypertext browser to help the access and navigation of system documentation. The prototype was used on a large scientific system that belongs to an oil company, with positive results.  1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.