Exercises and Discussion Topics

  1. Select three large projects from the course's reference source code and classify the available documentation.
  2. Comment on the applicability of the documentation types we described in open-source development efforts.
  3. Present an overview of the source organization of apache Web server by examining the provided documentation.
  4. Locate one instance of a published algorithm reference in the course's reference source code. Map the published version of the algorithm against its implementation.
  5. Categorize and tabulate the types of problems described in the Bugs section of the Unix manual pages and sort them according to their frequency. Discuss the results you obtained.
  6. The course's reference source code contains over 40 references to undocumented behavior. Locate them and discuss the most common observed cause of documentation discrepancies.
  7. Compare the documentation formats we described on usability, readability, features provided, and amenability to automated processing by ad-hoc tools.
  8. Locate and typeset on a high quality output device each of the different documentation formats available in the course's reference source code in your local environment. Discuss the difficulties you encountered.