Applying Knowledge Acquisition and Language Generation Technology to the Production of End-User Documentation

End-user documentation is an important part of a software system. It is, therefore, unfortunate that the process of producing this documentation is frequently seen as separate from the process of designing the software. Integrating the documentation and software development processes would provide technical authors greater input to the overall design process, and would grant them access to the artifacts created during that process. These artifacts, which include written specifications, software and interface design models, and prototypes, are being used more and more frequently to drive the software design process. This paper argues that these artifacts could, in a similar manner, be used to drive the automatic generation of parts of the end-user documentation. This approach would allow a tighter integration of documentation and software design and could lead to more consistent documentation that is easier to produce. To illustrate this approach, this paper presents Isolde, a support environment for technical authors that allows: (1) the integration of knowledge from various software design artifacts into a single-source model of the end-user documentation; and (2) the use of this model to drive the automated generation of parts of that end-user documentation. Accepted by the ACM Journal of Computer Documentation 2