Eclipse Community Awards 2012

Intent is a tool allowing developers to easily write a documentation up-to-date with any development artifact (code, environment, models, etc.). Therefore it will answer to the well-known fact: "documentation update is a burden, so developers do not write doc".

Quickly, documentation becomes useless, as it does not reflect the recent changes you made on your software. Sooner or later, no one will read it any more, and the design choices your team made will be lost. This has direct impacts on productivity and code quality: most of the time spent on the software is then dedicated to browsing through it, doing changes and testing those just to figure out the implications of the change.

Mylyn did start to off-load the developer brain by leveraging the - invisible at that time – Task concept.
Documentation is a major aspect of life-cycle management: just like Mylyn Tasks, document can turn into a real support for sharing knowledge about some design, if keeping this documentation in sync with the reality is a no-brainer.

Providing a language mixing documentation and code on top of models is a promising way to help developers to provide useful documentation and to keep it up-to-date. Furthermore, integrating it directly in the IDE lowers the barrier of the documentation update and will allow cross-references with concrete development artifacts.

Project URL: http://www.eclipse.org/intent/