Alex Lagarde, EclipseCon Europe 2012 “Documentation sucks...

Alex Lagarde, EclipseCon Europe 2012

“Documentation sucks because most of the time it’s outdated: it never reflects the recent changes you made on your software, and sooner or later no one will trust (and hence read) it anymore. By providing tooling to efficiently update documentation when a change occurs (in your models, your code…), Mylyn Intent gives to your documents the abillity to react to changes, turning them into true Agile documents. Moreover, as we’re in 2012 Intent provides advanced tooling to write/query your documentation with everything you would expect from a modern IDE (completion, quick-fixes, quick-outlines to browse through documents…). Icing on the cake, you can also collaborate in real time to write your documentation, preventing you from sending documents through mails or handle SVN conflicts.

During the Eclipse Juno release, we used Mylyn Intent to document models describing Enterprise Architectures, computed through the use of the Obeo SmartEA Modeling Tool. In the Design phase, models were quickly evolving and it was a good chance to test how can Intent help us keeping the doc up-to-date with those changes.

In 2012, and one can expect more than an outdated, non-IDE integrated documentation exchanged through mails or SCM tools. Attend to this talk to discover:

How to use Intent to quickly create meaningful Design documentation How to use Intent to keep this documentation up-to-date whith changes made on your models How to collaborate in real-time around your documentation tasks

What features were missing for efficently document EA models and how did we respond to these industrial needs.”

For more information on Mylyn Intent, have a look at the project on eclipse.org or directly on twitter.