Weaki Desktop App: a tool for agile software documentation

Abstract

Software documentation is an important aspect of software development but unfortunately not treated as such most of the time. There are many known ways to document software and these should be adopted by the developers taking their work environment into account. The target audi- ence is the most important factor since it dictates the contents and structure of the documentation and assumes the pre-acquired knowledge of the reader. Documentation for the product's end-user should be completely different to the one viewed by the development team for example. Agile development describes a mindset which focuses on doing only what is required when it is required. This can also be applied to documentation and there is a set of guidelines to follow among which reusability and simplicity stand out. These two guidelines can be interpreted as the most basic requirements for agile software documentation tools. Weaki is a cross-platform desktop application, based on the Electron framework, for agile software documentation meant to extend its web version based on DokuWiki. Its principles are based on weakly-typed wikis which means that the pages are structured but it is not enforced on the user who has the freedom to gradually adopt stricter rules but with benefits. Running natively on the desktop brings many benefits such as direct access to the file system, integration with Git and the ability to customize the application to the user. The application is developed with the use of agile methods in which at the end of each iteration, one week-long, there's palpable progress and reports on the situation. Starting by implementing the core features of the web version of Weaki, at the end of 3 months it is expected to start working for the next month on refinements and extra-features such as integrating with Slack, GitHub and Google Drive. The results are then compared to the initial goals and the conclusions are taken.