It's 2012 and your documentation sucks

This week is EclipseCon Europe 2012, and as always we’re going to have a great time.

Thursday, I’m going to show you why your doc sucks, and what should you do to be able to proudly say “RTFM” to your users and team members.

Here is a quick teasing, but you’ll have to attend my talk to see a full use-case showing how can Intent be used to document Enterprise Architecture Models (computed through the SmartEA tool).

1. It’s 2012, we need to be able to detect when doc gets outdated!

To do so, Intent maintains formal links between doc parts and technical artifacts (whether it’s Models, Java Code, Manifest file, C++ Code…). This allows to automatically determine which parts of the Doc have to be updated when a change occur, preventing you from a painfull manual search through the hundred of pages of your doc.

And of course, Intent leverage these formal links, providing tooling for querying your doc (“Which doc parts define/reference/contribute to this concept?”, “What are the relationships between these two concepts?”, “Which technical artifacts are related to this doc part?”…)

2. It’s 2012, we need real-time collaboration around doc!

Documenting is a social task, and real-time collaboration around doc will help you create better specifications.