Last updated on Monday, October 06, 2025
@inproceedings{VanGeet2010IWPSEEVOL,
author = {Joris Van Geet and Peter Ebraert and Serge Demeyer},
booktitle = {Proceedings {IWPSE-EVOL} '10 (4th International Joint
ERCIM/IWPSE Symposium on Software Evolution)},
month = sep,
note = {Acceptance ratio: 13/31 = 49.9\%},
title = {Redocumentation of a Legacy Banking System: An
Experience Report},
year = {2010},
abstract = {Successful software systems need to be maintained. In
order to do that, deep knowledge about their
architecture and implementation details is required.
This knowledge is often kept implicit (inside the
heads of the experts) and sometimes made explicit in
documentation. The problem is that systems often lack
up-to-date documentation and that system experts are
frequently unavailable (as they got another job or
retired). Redocumentation addresses that problem by
recovering knowledge about the system and making it
explicit in documentation. Automating the
redocumentation process can limit the tedious and
error-prone manual effort, but it is no 'silver
bullet'. In this paper, we report on our experience
with applying redocumentation techniques in industry.
We provide insights on what (not) to document, what
(not) to automate and how to automate it. A concrete
lesson learned during this study is that the ``less
is more'' principle also applies to redocumentation.},
annote = {workshoppaper},
}