How do you document the purpose, scope, and objectives of your algorithms?

1 Why document algorithms?

Documenting algorithms is not only a good habit, but also a professional requirement in many contexts. It helps you and others to understand the rationale, functionality, and limitations of your algorithms. It also facilitates communication, collaboration, and verification among different stakeholders, such as developers, testers, reviewers, clients, and users. Moreover, documenting algorithms can improve the quality, maintainability, and scalability of your code, as well as prevent errors, bugs, and ambiguities.

2 What to document?

The main elements that you should document for your algorithms are the purpose, scope, and objectives. The purpose describes what the algorithm does and why it is needed. The scope defines the inputs, outputs, parameters, and assumptions of the algorithm. The objectives specify the expected outcomes, performance, and constraints of the algorithm. Depending on the complexity and context of your algorithms, you may also document other aspects, such as the algorithm design, pseudocode, flowcharts, test cases, and references.

3 How to document?

When documenting your algorithms, you should use clear, concise, and consistent language and terminology. Comments, annotations, or docstrings within your code can help explain the logic and details of your algorithms. Additionally, external documentation tools such as Markdown, LaTeX, or HTML can create more structured and readable documents. To organize and illustrate your documentation, use headings, sections, lists, tables, diagrams, and code snippets. Furthermore, use consistent and meaningful naming conventions for variables, functions, classes and files. Lastly, remember to update your documentation whenever you change your algorithms.

4 Example of documentation

To illustrate how to document the purpose, scope, and objectives of your algorithms, let's look at a simple example of an algorithm that calculates the factorial of a positive integer. The factorial of a number n is the product of all positive integers from 1 to n. For example, the factorial of 5 is 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 120. Here is how we can document this algorithm using Python docstrings:

def factorial(n):

"""Calculate the factorial of a positive integer.

Purpose: The algorithm computes the factorial of a given number using a recursive function.

Scope: The algorithm takes a positive integer n as input and returns a positive integer as output. It assumes that n is valid and does not check for errors or exceptions.

Objectives: The algorithm aims to return the correct factorial value for any positive integer n in the shortest possible time and using the least possible memory.

Args:

n (int): The positive integer whose factorial is to be calculated.

Returns:

int: The factorial of n.

Examples:

>>> factorial(5)

120

>>> factorial(0)

1

"""

if n == 0 or n == 1:

return 1

else:

return n * factorial(n-1)

5 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?