On the Creation and Maintenance of a Documentation Generator in an Applied Research Context.

Reverse engineering-based documentation generation extracts facts from software artefacts to generate suitable representations in another level of abstraction. Although the tool perspective in documentation generation has been studied before by many others, these studies mostly report on constructive aspects from case studies, e.g. how tools are built and evaluated. However, we believe a long-term perspective is important to cover issues that arise after initial deployment of a tool. In this paper, we present challenges and observations made during prototyping, development and maintenance of a documentation generator in an applied research project. Insights are drawn from different project phases over a period of 4-years and cover topics related to tool implementation as well as topics related to knowledge transfer in an applied research project. A key observation is that the maintenance of the system to be documented often triggers maintenance effort on the documentation generator.