Constructural Software Documentation

Abstract

Software projects capture information in artifacts that include production code, test suites, and documentation. Because different artifacts serve different purposes, some artifacts can include redundant information, encoded in different formats. To mitigate this redundancy, we propose an approach to explicitly encode in unit tests information that will be automatically extracted and added to the documentation of the software. We implemented this approach in the form of an Eclipse plug-in that binds unit tests written with JUnit to the header comments of the tested methods.