Task-oriented documentation for eclipse-based applications

Consumer electronic products as well as software applications we use every day always have user documentations. This type of documentation provides users valuable information about how to use the product and what capabilities the product has. From simple "first steps" documentation to detailed documents of how to use all capabilities, user documentation is always an important part of a product. The end users appreciate the quality of the documentation, which increases their overall satisfaction. Therefore, creating good user documentation adds value to the product, empowering the user to use the product, and even can decide about the market success of a product. However, creating and continuously updating documentation usually is an arduous job due to the nature of the software development: As Lehman's laws state [Leh80] "a program that is used in a real-world environment necessarily must change or become progressively less useful in that environment". This implies a continuing change of the software, and accordingly the user documentation has to follow, because out-dated documents are useless for the user. The solution we developed in this master thesis aims at automating the user documentation generation process. It is a model-based solution for generating task-oriented user documentation. Therefore, we extended a user interface testing tool (ScATE - Scenario-based Application Test Environment [ScATE10]), which can execute all relevant features for testing purposes anyway. The tool has been enriched with additional information to be able to compose up-to-date user documentation. The solution generates the final user documentation in an automated way. Hence, all the changes of the interface will be reflected in an almost effortless way, reducing the time of creation and updating this user documentation. After developed a prototype of this software we integrated with the user interface testing environment Eclipse plug-in ScATE to create automatic user documentation using previously designed cases. One of the main parts of software development is the testing phase. In this phase all parts of the software are tested to guarantee the perfect performance and correctness of the product. To enable efficient test case development ant test case execution for user interface features was developed ScATE. ScATE is an Eclipse plug-in that applies model-driven testing together with user interface testing to generate automated tests. As there are developed a set of test cases for the Fraunhofer SAVE [SAVE09] (Software Architecture Visualization and Evaluation) tool, we use these existing test cases to generate user documentation for the tool in an integrated way.