Software development organizations need to have appropriate document control policies. A software document classification can serve as a framework for establishing such policies. This paper presents a software document classification and discusses the quality system functions needed for each class of documents. Software development is viewed as a documentation process, and documents are considered the most essential products of the development process. Referring to the document classification, new definitions for the concept of software are given, and the general difficulties of software documentation are analyzed.

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Software developers and maintainers need to read and understand source programs and other kinds of software documents in their work. Understandability of software documetlts is thus important. This paper introduces a method for estimating the understandability of software documents. The method is based on a language theory accorditzg to which ever T softwore document i.~ considered to contain a language of its own, which is a set of symbols. The understandability of documents written according to different documentation practices can be compared using the rules of the language theory. The method and the language theory are presented by usbtg source programs with different namhlg styles as example documents. The method can, at least theoretically, be applied to any kind of document, it can also be used to explain the benefits of some well-known software design methods.

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