Book Image

Managing Software Development with Trac and Subversion

By : David J Murphy
Book Image

Managing Software Development with Trac and Subversion

By: David J Murphy

Overview of this book

<p><br />Trac is a minimalistic open-source enhanced wiki and bug/issue tracking system for software development projects, designed to help developers while staying out of the way and provides an interface to Subversion. Subversion is an open-source version control system that addresses many of the perceived deficiencies of CVS and can use WebDAV for network communications, and the Apache web server to provide repository-side network service.<br /><br />This book presents a simple set of processes and practices that allow you to manage these projects using open-source software without getting in the way by imposing as little as possible on established development practices and policies.<br /><br />This book looks at what is needed to manage software development projects, how web-based software project management system Trac and open-source revision control system Subversion meet these needs, and how to install, configure, and use them.</p> <p><a href="http://www.packtpub.com/article/managing-software-development-with-trac-and-subversion-table-of-contents"><br /></a></p>
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Chapter 4. Documentation

Documentation—if there is one word that instils fear in most developers, it must be this one. No one in their right mind would argue the value of documentation, but it is the actual act of writing it that concerns developers so.

As with everything else presented in the book, the secret of creating good documentation is to make the process of doing so as painless as possible, and if we are lucky maybe even attractive, to the developers. The only practical way to achieve that is to reduce friction. The last thing we need when we are in middle of fixing a bug is to wrestle with our word processor, or even worse try to find the right document to update.

Note

What's in a name?

Throughout the rest of this chapter, and indeed the rest of this book, we will refer to various URLs that point to specific areas of our Trac environment, Subversion repository, or WebDAV folders. Whenever you see servername, replace it with your own server name.

Making Documentation Easy

One of the...