An automatic documentation generator based on model-driven techniques

Software documentation is very important in the process of software maintenance. In this paper, we propose a new methodology for automatic documentation generation, which is capable of maintaining the consistency between software documentation and the corresponding software system in model-driven development. We first set up the documentation model, and then map system model elements to documentation model elements. Finally, we combine the documentation model with specific document format templates and generate the “requirements specification”, “preliminary design specification” and “detailed design specification”. An automatic transmission system is used to provide experimental results to demonstrate the engineering value of our documentation generator. In addition, we analyze and experimentally evaluate the factors affecting the document generation time, and provide a method for predicting the document generation time.