Patterns for Documenting Open Source Frameworks

TL;DR

This paper identifies and describes four new patterns for documenting open source frameworks, aiming to improve documentation practices and user support through pattern-based solutions.

Contribution

It uncovers four novel documentation patterns from open source frameworks that address common challenges in documentation creation and maintenance.

Findings

Four new documentation patterns identified

Patterns improve contributor onboarding and user support

Enhanced documentation practices for open source frameworks

Abstract

Documenting frameworks provides its users and maintainers useful information on that software's architecture, design, and customization. Despite documentation's importance, the process of creating and maintaining it is considered to imply considerable effort, to be tedious, and expensive. In this work, we mine patterns from open source frameworks to uncover good solutions used to document them that had not yet been described as patterns. This process resulted in four new patterns. "Contribution Guidelines" helps developers to become contributors to a project, helping them follow the good practices that have been adopted by its maintainers. "Documentation Versioning" consists of having separate documentation for older versions of the framework, to answer needs of the users on such versions. "Migration Handbook" helps users migrating from previous versions of the framework to newer ones. "Multi-language Support" allows translated documents in several languages to support a wider range of users for the framework.