Category:Software Documentation Pages

This is a super-category of categories of pages that serve as documentation for software we write. There are two types of documentation: user documentation and programmer documentation.

User documentation is for users of software that we write. The users of a GUI program are probably students, experiment subjects, or collaborators. The users of a command-line program or helper script are probably people within our own group who will use the program to do research. Every significant piece of software, whether it has a GUI or not, should have user documentation.

Programmer documentation is for programmers who would like to either modify source code we've written or use one of our libraries in their own code. Every significant piece of software, especially libraries, should have programmer documentation.

Keep in mind that users and programmers, even if they're in our group, even if they're the same person that originally wrote the code, will at some point have almost no knowledge of the program in question. Documentation should be written to explain the software to a novice.

Please also keep in mind that a Doxygen/Javadoc dump does not suffice as documentation, unless you've been incredibly thorough in writing Doxygen/Javadoc comments in your code. If you haven't actually written any words yourself, you haven't written documentation.