Dear Diary: Helping novices creating better code documentation

While developing of a new project, novices often neglect the creation of useful documentation, which is usually composed of comments whose helpfulness is minimal for future reference and understanding. Moreover, such documentation lacks relative and contextual information, including errors encountered and the corresponding solutions found, lessons learned, consulted documents, choices and missteps made. By giving a seamless way to create artifacts with rich data, novices can generate valuable documentation for themselves and other developers. Thereby, in this thesis, I designed and developed Dear Diary, a Visual Studio Code extension that allows non-expert programmers to generate pieces of documentation directly in the IDE. Other than capturing code snippets, files, or entire projects, the tool automatically collects useful information such as the file tree, the dependencies, and the command line scripts. The data is encapsulated in an artifact called “snapshots”, and these are grouped into “diaries”, which is convenient for keeping correlated snapshots together. In addition, snapshots can be enriched with insights and comments for better contextualizing what has been saved. Diaries can also be used as a reference for future work when the developer faces similar problems. This should lead to a faster implementation of solutions by novices. Furthermore, Dear Diary allows developers to easily keep track of the evolution of the project and the achievements reached. After analyzing similar and related projects in literature, the tool’s core functionalities have been selected. Then, a prototype was developed and tested on a group of students to evaluate the effective impact of the extension. Finally, the results have been examined to evaluate its future potential.