Software Verification and Functional Testing with XML Documentation

Continuous testing is an important aspect of achieving quality during rapid software development. By making the user documentation for a software product into part of its testing machinery, we can leverage each to benefit the other. The documentation itself can be automatically tested and kept in a state of synchronization with the software. Conversely, if the documentation can be machine interpreted, evaluation of the software’s adherence to this description simultaneously verifies the documentation and serves as a functional test of the software. This paper presents an application of these ideas to a real project, the manual for Jess, the Java Expert System Shell. The Jess manual is rich in machine-interpretable information and is used in several distinct modes within Jess’ extensive functional and unit test suites. The effort to maintain the accuracy and completeness of Jess’s documentation has dropped significantly since this method was put in place.