Types of documentation

Documentation is an important part of software engineering that is often overlooked. Types of documentation include:

• Architecture - Architectural overview of software; including relations to an environment, construction principles to be used in design and technical documentation, etc.
• Design - The design of software components.
• Technical - Documentation of code, algorithms, interfaces, APIs.
• End User - Manuals for the end-user.
• Operator - Manuals for the systems administrator.
• Application operator - Manuals for the "superuser" of the software.
• Help desk - Manuals for first and second line support.

Tools for architectural, design and technical documentation

• Unified Modeling Language UML.

Tools for API documentation

• DoxyGen - a documentation system for C++, C, Java, Objective-C, IDL (Corba and Microsoft flavors) and to some extent PHP, C# and D.
• Perl POD - Plain Old Documentation is commonly used for Perl Documentation, but can be used in general. See also Scheme POD for a scheme variant of Perl POD.

Ways of thinking about software engineering and documentation

• Literate_programming.
• Elemental programming.