DocUScore

Scoreboard
Comments

Story

Oftentimes developers have little incentive to write documentation. Not only is it tedious to write documentation, but the developer writing the docs is usually the one who benefits least from it, as they understand their code. The VSCode Extension DocUScore not only makes it easier for developers to write documentation by providing better comment highlighting, but it also makes it more fun. We introduced a repository-wide scoreboard, and allowed people to like documentation that were especially well written. That way, developers get recognition for their work, especially in front of supervisors.

Challenges we ran into

Aside from a lack of sleep and toothbrushes, we ran into challenges with Gradle. Originally, we planned to write the plugin for JetBrains IDEs, but due to continuing issues with Gradle we pivoted to VSCode.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We introduced some special highlights for comments starting with “q?” (for questions) or “a!” (for answer) to create conversation-style comments. This was a challenge for us, since we hadn’t previously worked with parsers. Repeatedly experiencing setbacks, reaching from our issues with Gradle to finding out that certain things that we had counted on to work from our experience with the Jetbrains toolkit do not work in VSCode, we’re proud to have come up with alternative solutions for our problems. The thing we are most proud of is our idea and our collaboration.

What we learned

We got a deeper understanding of some of the challenges IDE-Developers face.

What's next for DocUScore

Aside from some code cleanup and some minor features we’d like to add, there are some design decisions we’d like to give more thought to. We’d also like to extend the upvote functionality to reward good code and commit messages. Of course, we’d also like to build a DocUScore IntelliJ Plugin.