Accurate and up to date documentation makes your components, applications, web services, schemas and databases easier to use and maintain, reducing support requirements whilst improving quality and productivity. New developers can come up to speed on existing projects quickly and knowledge can be easily shared amongst team members. If you develop solutions for an external customer, delivering accurate and professional documentation will improve your customers perception of your product and your company.
In a team environment, Document! X provides a highly effective way for each member of the development team to contribute to the technical documentation and on-line help as an integral part of the everyday development process.
So why is documentation so often incomplete or skipped entirely? Documentation is traditionally a time consuming, skills intensive (and therefore expensive) and often unpopular task. These factors commonly result in documentation either being skipped entirely or becoming the last task in a project schedule, loathed by the unfortunate developer or developers who are given the task.
Document! X makes the production and maintenance of professional documentation fast and easy. Documentation generation with Document! X is automated, meaning that all of the content and structure (including Table of Contents, Index, Full Text Search, See Also links, relationship diagrams etc.) is produced automatically without requiring the skills, time or resources involved in manual documentation production. By utilizing existing descriptions where available (C#, VB.NET and C++/CLI Xml format source comments, COM HelpString attributes, Javadoc source comments, XSD Annotations, Access and SQL Server description attributes), Document! X reduces to an absolute minimum the amount of time and effort required.
A Visual Comment Editor integrated with Visual Studio makes it simple and easy to create, maintain and validate documentation content whilst coding, uniting the documentation effort with development activities. Enabling developers to include documentation content in the form of source comments encourages documentation standards and ensures that documentation content is captured whilst the code is still 'hot'. Technical writers can use the authoring tools in Document! X to supplement or override content derived from source in order to complete the documentation set.
With Document! X, documentation becomes an integral part of the development process, requiring minimal effort to achieve professional results for every project. Because documentation is fully automated it can be run frequently throughout the development process, providing a valuable reference during design and development as well as once development is complete.