DevDocOps: towards automated documentation for DevOps

The proliferation of DevOps enables significant acceleration and automation of the delivery and deployment of massive software products. Unfortunately, the development of supporting documents that is vital for large scale software systems in many cases does not keep pace with the rhythm of feature delivery using DevOps in practice, which becomes the bottleneck for many software organizations to deliver full value to the customers as claimed by DevOps. This paper proposes, implements, and evaluates a new approach, DevDocOps, for continuous automated documentation, in particular for DevOps. With DevDocOps, developers are able to create the documents simultaneously with their working versions of software, which largely guarantees the accuracy and integrity of documents as well as significantly increases their delivery speed. Within an established delivery chain, a set of templates are created to collect and transform the required information from its origin to the target documents for delivery. A real system, iDoc, is implemented to map, collect, and synthesizethe information from document templates and automate the documentation process. The iDoc system supports the generation of documents in minutes and the instant feedback loop as well. DevDocOps has been successfully adopted in over 30 large software projects in a top tier global telecommunication enterprise. The lag time between the releases of the product version and its supporting document has been shortened from 1--2 months on average to less than 2 days. DevDocOps extends the scope of DevOps and enhances the value delivery by supporting continuous documentation and bridging the gap between feature delivery and document delivery with automation.