Abstract

Abstract

Abstract
Creating and using software documentation presents numerous challenges, namely in what concerns the expression of knowledge structures, consistency maintenance and classification. Adaptive Software Artifacts is a flexible approach to expressing structured contents that tackles these concerns, and that is being realized in the context of a Software Forge. Copyright © 2013 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. (ACM).

Abstract
Software architecture is reflected across multiple artifacts, making it difficult to communicate without proper documentation, which often becomes outdated or unreliable. We propose an approach to support Living Documentation by generating architectural diagrams from Docker Compose files. We implement our approach as a prototype tool that we name Infragenie and conduct an empirical study to show the viability of the approach. The study involved sending questionnaires to maintainers of 378 GitHub repositories. We received 36 responses. Infragenie-generated diagrams were rated as better or much better for most of the 12 projects with previous diagrams. Over 70% of the respondents agreed that our approach improved documentation completeness, consistency, and accessibility, and more than 90% recognized its effectiveness in capturing key architectural elements. We conclude that by using Docker Compose files we were able to provide useful architectural diagrams.