Foundation for Open Project Documentation

The Foundation for Open Project Documentation ^[1] is an organization. Its main idea is to create detailed and public documentation for all stages of software creation. The foundation was established in 2002 on the grand opening of the semifinals of ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest in Saint Petersburg by Anatoly Shalyto. This foundation was announced on the Linux Summit 2004,^[2]^[3] Russian Outsourcing and Software Summit 2004^[4] and Open Source Forum Russia 2005.^[5] Project documentation development approbation in the context of this foundation was made in projects created using Switch-technology, intended for supporting Automata-Based Programming.^[6]^[7]

Anatoly Shalyto on Linux Summit 2004, Helsinki

Motivation

The motivation for creating detailed documentation is considered the following:

software quality increases
program verification simplifies
project modification becomes easier and safer

The motivation for making documentation open is considered the following:

project becomes less dependent on its initial authors
other people can easily understand structure and behaviour of a program
design decisions reuse becomes easier and safer
it becomes possible to use real project for study purposes

Application

Foundation for Open Project Documentation gives a project a greater understandability and re-usability potential, than Open Source foundation. It is loosely connected with Free Software Foundation. OpenDoc project can also be commercial.

Main principles

The project documentation should be a base for source code, but not vice versa.
The documentation should describe not only the final product, but also the creation process.
The documentation should be easy to understand even for less qualified developers than its author.
The documentation should be available every time anyone explores or modifies a project.

References

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 6/21/2013. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.