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Document XSLT automatically: how to document conditional text processing for business users.

Article Excerpt
Business users spend a great deal of money on new software systems. For this they demand faithful implementation of their project objectives. And they expect enough visibility into an application to verify that their goals have been implemented. This visibility also ensures that changes can be identified to satisfy new business goals.

One approach to meeting these objectives is the use of a formal specification language. The intent is that the increased formality in the specification will lead to an implementation closer to the goals of the business. Formal specification approaches include algebraic languages such as Z and diagrammatic languages such as UML. While many such language have been developed, few can serve as a bridge between business users and software developers. This is due primarily to the large gap between domain concepts and software design tools. In addition, unless implementation can be created automatically from the specification languages, maintenance of the implementation often diverges quickly from its initial design.

Consequently, most business users rely on documentation to explain the inner workings of a system. This addresses the critical need to gain visibility into the system to ensure that their goals have been met and the system can be changed easily to adjust to new business concerns. The value of documentation depends on:

* How well it conveys an understanding of the system

* How easily modifications can be performed

* How well the documentation can be kept up to date with new changes

The area of literate programming addresses this concern somewhat--although the most widely used tools, such as Java-docs, are used by programmers for the benefit of other programmers.

This article discusses a method of automatically documenting, in domain-specific terms, the behavior of conditional text processing applications. The use of such terms, as well as actual text in its domain-specific format, yields a small gap that can be readily bridged by business users. The documentation presents a form that can be marked up by business users with minimal ambiguity. Automatic generation of the documentation ensures that it remains faithful to each build of the application.

Conditional text processing is a very large horizontal application area with potential impact...

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