Docs-checker: uma ferramenta de análise de documentações escritas a partir de geradores de sites estáticos em Markdown

Abstract

Documentations are crucial artifacts in software development. The documentation explains the purpose of projects, unifies information and in general, avoids possible doubts from interested parties. For the documentation to be effective, its structure must be simple, friendly and direct, however, ensuring that these requirements are met is a difficult job, mainly because it is currently a process carried out manually. In this work, we will create a tool to analyze the conformity of API documentation structures with a specification, taking into account those written using static site generators (SSGs) in markdown. The system establishes rules that the documentation must meet and thus automatically assesses the quality of the documentation. The user is able to customize these rules according to his needs. The performance of the tool was evaluated and the data obtained revealed that the solution has a linear complexity behavior, taking approximately 300 milliseconds for small documents and 1 minute for large ones. In addition, when evaluating the tool in popular documentation such as React and Typescript, we obtained a success rate of more than 80%, proving that the solution is able to guarantee the conformity of the documentation structure.