The Software Concordance: A User Interface for Advanced Software Documents

The Software Concordance is a hypermedia software development environment exploring how document technology and versioned hypermedia can improve software document management. The Software Concordance’s central tool is a document editor that integrates program analysis and hypermedia services for both source code and multimedia documentation in XML. The editor allows developers to embed inline multimedia documentation, including images and audio clips, into their program sources and to bind them to any program fragment. Web style hyperlinks are also supported. The developers are able to move seamlessly between source code and the documentation that describes its motivation, design, correctness and use without disrupting the integrated program analysis services, which include lexing, parsing and type checking. This paper motivates the need for environments like the Software Concordance, describes the key features and architecture of its document editor and discusses future work to improve its functionality.