Integrating Development, Documentation and Reporting
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:Authors: Dr. Ana Nelson
:Time: 17:20
:Session: http://docs.writethedocs.org/en/2013/conference/talks.html#ana-nelson
:Link: @ananelson / http://dexy.it/ado

Nelson is a former economist, and now a software developer, and became
interested in document automation while working on her economics
thesis. Dexy is the tool she wrote to support automating
documentation.

There are lots of tools for authoring code and for authoring prose,
but the tools for automating and tying them together haven't kept up.
There are approaches for putting your prose in code, or code in prose,
but they're generally inflexible and rigid. But what if you have tools
that let you keep things independent from one another, and then bring
them together?

Before we talk about the tool, what about data? It's a third sort of
information, in addition to prose and code. If documentation lives in
the space between prose and code, analysis lives between code and
data, and reporting lives between prose and data.

There are inputs that cost money -- code, prose, and data -- and there
are outputs that add value: documentation, reporting, and analysis.

`Dexy <http://dexy.it>`_ is a tool for automating the integration of
code, prose, and data. In other words, it's a tool for automating
reporting, analysis, and documentation.