Operational Documentation

The Operational Documentation (OP) consists of the Developer Manual Section 9.2 and the User Manual Section 9.3. It is important that the user’s experience of the software feeds back into the instructions as to how to use the software, and mechanisms for achieving this end appear in Section 9.4.

Documentation Generally

Documentation

Documentation refers to a particular version of the code. It should therefore be dynamic, under version control, and tightly coupled to the source code itself.

  • • All new code features should be documented, and this should be checked as part of the peer review process.

  • • Within the code, comments should use a convention, such as that accepted by Doxygen, to document the intent of functions, and any assumptions on their environment, input or outputs.

  • • Alongside the code README files explaining the file/directory layout typically use the Markdown format due to its simplicity, standardising on the variant defined by Pandoc as described in ref. [2].

  • • The more formal documentation should be in a format which can include elements such as equations, code blocks, graphs and figures. It should also be easily convertible to other formats, and in particular online documentation. as used to produce the current document can be easily converted to .html as explained in ref. [2] provided the restrictions (as to accepted packages) noted in the reference are observed.