Welcome to LumiCode

The reason there is so little good software documentation out there is because it’s very time consuming to produce.

Projects often have a design phase at the beginning that uses up much of the schedule and produces a pile of documents which soon become outdated, or worse, an obstacle to improving the design later when more is known.

As “design first” methodologies are replaced by newer more promising ones, a way is needed to keep an evolving design documented without putting a spoke in the wheel of the development. LumiCode is aimed directly at this need.

LumiCode gets its data directly from your assemblies, which means it will work with C#, VB.NET, or other .NET languages.

Goals for LumiCode

The design of LumiCode was driven by three main goals :

1. The exploration experience

LumiCode is for exploring software, not just documenting it. When you have a question about the software you are working on, rather than see if a document exists, explore the software with LumiCode. The views you create are saved as named tabs in the application, so they can be viewed on-screen or printed. To work this way, a tool must be fast.

2. Speed of use

Anyone who has used a graphical software design tool knows what time sinks they can be. Hours turn into days.

LumiCode performs automatic layout based on the relationships between your classes and methods. Then you can quickly “tweak” the layout to look exactly how you like it. This can be done in seconds.

3. Complexity control

To learn how a jet engine works, you would not start with a stack of blueprints. That’s way more information than you can deal with. What you want is a simple conceptual diagram that you can understand.

In the same way, complicated, hard to understand software diagramed in great detail becomes a set of complicated, hard to understand diagrams.

LumiCode let’s you show only the details that illuminate your design. Rather than wall charts, you produce sets of single page documents that clarify the part of the design you are interested in.