For software developers, one of the most useful business management software tools are documentation generators. Documentation generators allow a software developer to quickly document the source code associated with a software application or database.
Source code documentation generators are available for most programming languages. Popular programming languages for which documentation generators are available include C# and Visual Basic and Java. Documentation generators are also available for the popular website scripting technologies of Active Server Pages (ASP) and PHP.
Database documentors are also available. These allow software developers or database administrators (DBA's) to automatically create documentation for databases. Databases are notoriously time consuming and very boring to document by hand, so these documentation tools very quickly have a big return on their investment.
Why Documentation Generators are Important
Source code documentation generators have a wide range of benefits, including:
- Documentation generators are an extremely fast way of documenting application source code, and are many times faster than manually documenting source code.
- Documentation generators save a great deal of time at the end of a project, meaning the development team has more time to focus on other essential tasks such as software testing.
- Many software projects rely on a large pool of software developers who frequently move between projects. Having an application properly documented ensures that developers can quickly get up to speed if brought onto a new project.
- The latest generation of programming languages such as C#, Visual Basic.NET and Java allow source code documentation to be written in the application source code itself, meaning that software developers find it much easier to keep the documentation up to date.
- Documentation generators can be used by technical authors as a way of creating the initial technical documentation for an application.