Old – XFinder Evaluation

Producing usable documentation has always been a tedious task, and even communicating important knowledge about a system among collaborators is difficult. Mismar is an approach and a toolset to creating documentation in the form of guides, which encapsulate passive information about important tasks along with active steps to be followed. The approach is concern-based, and introduces active steps into traditionally passive concerns. A developer can begin by creating a concern that identifies elements of importance in the context of a task, which, we believe, is easier and more natural than trying to formulate a process up front. S/he can then easily create a guide to the task based on this concern, and export it. Other developers can follow the guide, and, as they do so, their results are recorded as examples for future reference.

XFinder is a tool extending Mismar that automatically locates implementation examples given a Mismar guide.

This is a project I worked on during my first summer internship at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center with my colleague and mentor Harold Ossher.

Status

Legacy mode: the software is provided as is and is no longer maintained. Mismar and XFinder can be freely downloaded on AlphaWorks (it is called “Guides Assistant”).

Evaluation Data