Combining Literate Programming and Functional Unit Tests to Augment the Workflow and Documentation in Software Development Projects

Modern society is moving towards a thorough informatization of all aspects of daily life. Managing information and knowledge becomes a central activity. An essential medium and tool in this way of life nowadays is software. While information systems become more ubiquitous, they are not growing together seamlessly. Their structure and interactions induce too much complexity. This software crisis is caused by increasing fragmentation: there are ever more hardware platforms, operating systems, programming languages, libraries, frameworks, communication protocols, data formats and so on. Software developers are threatened to be overwhelmed by this complexity. It takes too much effort to fully comprehend the systems they create and maintain. Also, a lot of work is needlessly duplicated, as existing functionality is inaccessibly buried in closed environments and has to be created anew on many occasions. That way, the most precious resource we have is wasted: human time and attention.

The presented thesis attempts to address the challenges posed by complexity. It proposes a concept for a software development workflow that strives towards adopting a unified view of software artifacts, regardless of the language they are written in or the platform they are based on. This aims at making units of functionality accessible across environment boundaries. A technique is presented that assists developers by an automated process of integrating source code, driven by test cases. Further, the technical side is complemented by an approach to literate software documentation that helps people to understand complex systems better than traditional source code comments.

The proposed model draws on several distinct principles and ideas that are today mostly seen isolated from each other, or haven't gained much attention at all. However, this new combination of old methodologies might be able to effectively address the challenges posed by the increasing complexity in future development projects.