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Chris Stevenson, fellow team-member, has started Agiledox, a small project to collect ideas and tools for automating documentation.

It is typical in agile projects that the code and design changes so quickly that the documentation (if any) never keeps up. We are using Agiledox on our current project to help give us all a high-level map of what the system does at all times.

When practicing collective code ownership it is vital that all developers know how the entire system works, not just their bit (they have no bit). With bigger systems that are constantly evolving it is unlikely that any one person knows how it all works, so it's nice to have a higher level roadmap of the system to look around before drilling into some code. Of course, this is no substitute for good communication - but it helps.

The first deliverabe in Agiledox is Testdox . It autogenerates documentation from testcases. Wow! How?

Simple. All it does is look at a test class and all the test method names and convert them from camal case Java names to sentences. Genius!

You may laugh, as I did. But I was amazed at what it produced for our project.

There's a catch though. It worked for us because we are well disciplined in the way we write tests. For a start, we were already in the habit of writing test case method names that describe what a class should do rather than what all the methods are. Don't moan that this low emission petrol isn't great when you're trying to put it in a deisel engine.

Run Testdox through WebStart.

Here's a handful of docs generated for our project. Sweet huh?

MenuModel

• View can be bound to a model
• Two views can be bound to one model
• Model contains menu text
• Model contains menu text after it is renamed
• View is populated from prepopulated model
• Model can be cleared
• Model can contain separator

CsvTableModel

• Column definitions are read from first row
• Values can be read from rows
• Column definition values return underlying value
• Model can be reloaded
• Column can be marked as date

NewOrderFinder

• Order with fills are returned
• Old orders and old fills are filtered out
• Old orders with new fills are not filtered out
• Assumed legs are filtered out
• Last check is maintained
• Spread components are grouped together