The Doc is in!

The exercise this week was all about documentation. Seeing as how we are in the middle of writing all the documentation for Obsidian I decided just to keep at it and continue working on the Obsidian documentation. My feelings on documentation were described in a earlier post, but I feel like Jeff Atwood describes the best methods of commenting on his blog Coding Horror. If the complexity of the code is high enough for you to write a dissertation in the method, you might want to reconsider refactoring it to be separated out a little bit more. 

One of the exercises was to write a wiki page of developer documentation for each program. Seeing as how I took hold of the "How to Contribute" page I decided just to finish it up with some common coding standards as well as modifying the build instructions for the source code. Other then that most of the documentation is almost finished, we are just working on the documentation for the poster. 

The team's meeting recently has been about the layout and wording of the poster. We tried making the sections understandable without being too much, but to fully explain parts of the project we had to write full paragraphs. An example of some of the poster documentation:

Overview:

Obsidian has four different patterns for tests that are determined by two factors: whether the function has parameters and whether the function throws exceptions. With the usage of these patterns Obsidian can create a test implementation for different types of methods. 

And an example of one of the patterns:

Call:

The CALL pattern, the simplest pattern, is generated on functions that do not have parameters and do not throw exceptions. All Obsidian can do in this case is call the method, and generate the assert statements. This is the basic building block of Obsidian, and is used in all of the other patterns.

I'm really excited to see how it turns out. I'm just sad that I will not be there the night before to help setup. I have a test the night that the rest of the team will be driving up, so I will not be at the welcoming party. This is good news in a way, seeing as how the stickers should be arriving the day that everyone else is heading up, so I'll be bringing them with me the next day (the first day of POSSCON).