Don't Waste Time Manually Writing Documentation

We all know documentation is important. Our software will likely need to be updated and upgraded at some point, oftentimes by another person who is unfamiliar with it. Even if we are the ones doing the updates we may not remember all the important details. That is why documentation is so important.

Writing documentation doesn’t always get priority though. It’s time consuming and tedious and often out of date by the time you are done writing it. Enter Antidoc – the antidote for documentation. Our friend and fellow DQMH Trusted Advisor Olivier over at WovaLabs has developed this tool to help with the challenge of maintaining up to date documentation.

You simply point Antidoc at your project and it will generate documentation for you. It traverses your LabVIEW code and pulls out icons, descriptions, datatypes, etc and assembles all that information in a nice orderly format. If you use DQMH it will go further and tell you what modules launch which other modules and how they all communicate. It’s all open source, so you can adapt it to your specific framework.

Here is a demo video that Olivier put together.

This video shows how easy it is to install antidoc and manually generate documentation from the tools menu .But there is more. Antidoc has a CLI so that you can make sure your documentation stays up to date by automatically updating it everytime you push changes to your repo.

There is also another use case which is worth mentioning – inherited or legacy code. Understanding someone else’s code can be a daunting task. Antidoc makes it easier. Just point it at the project and you’ll get all the documentation you wish the previous developer had left you.

If you want to learn how to integrate Antidoc and other tools with your CI process so you can spend more time on the things that really matter, like solving your customer’s problem, we can help. Let’s talk about it!