Document quality indicators: A framework for assessing documentation adequacy

Arthur, James D.; Stevens, K. T

doi:10.1002/smr.4360040303

Cited by 15 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Although there is no framework to assess the quality of technical cookbooks, at the best of our knowledge, there has been some work on assessing technical documents. Arthur and Stevens [27] developed a taxonomy for evaluating documentation, where an adequate documentation has four qualities: accuracy, completeness, usability, and expandability. Smart [28] studied quality factors for technical documentation in the context of software quality documents [28], and proposed three dimensions to evaluate documentation quality: easy to use (i.e.…”

Section: Cookbook Assessmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bootstrapping cookbooks for APIs from crowd knowledge on Stack Overflow

Souza

Campos

Madeiral

et al. 2019

Information and Software Technology

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Context: Well established libraries typically have API documentation. However, they frequently lack examples and explanations, possibly making difficult their effective reuse. Stack Overflow is a question-and-answer website oriented to issues related to software development. Despite the increasing adoption of Stack Overflow, the information related to a particular topic (e.g., an API) is spread across the website. Thus, Stack Overflow still lacks organization of the crowd knowledge available on it.Objective: Our target goal is to address the problem of the poor quality documentation for APIs by providing an alternative artifact to document them based on the crowd knowledge available on Stack Overflow, called crowd cookbook. A cookbook is a recipe-oriented book, and we refer to our cookbook as crowd cookbook since it contains content generated by a crowd. The cookbooks are meant to be used through an exploration process, i.e. browsing.Method: In this paper, we present a semi-automatic approach that organizes the crowd knowledge available on Stack Overflow to build cookbooks for APIs. We have generated cookbooks for three APIs widely used by the software development community: SWT, LINQ and QT. We have also defined desired properties that crowd cookbooks must meet, and we conducted an evaluation of the cookbooks against these properties with human subjects.Results: The results showed that the cookbooks built using our approach, in general, meet those properties. As a highlight, most of the recipes were considered appropriate to be in the cookbooks and have self-contained information.Conclusions: We concluded that our approach is capable to produce adequate cookbooks automatically, which can be as useful as manually produced cookbooks. This opens an opportunity for API designers to enrich existent cookbooks with the different points of view from the crowd, or even to generate initial versions of new cookbooks.

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Section: Cookbook Assessmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bootstrapping cookbooks for APIs from crowd knowledge on Stack Overflow

Souza

Campos

Madeiral

et al. 2019

Information and Software Technology

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“…These requirements do not only guide the design of the template but also its evaluation. Dautovic et al, (2011), Hargis et al, (2014), Arthur & Stevens (1990), and ISO/IEC 26514 (2008) have identified a number of generic requirements on documentation templates. These have been used as a basis for the specific requirements for the BP Document Template.…”

Section: The Low Quality Of Bp Documentation Can Impede the Use Of Bpmentioning

confidence: 99%

Template-driven Best Practice Documentation

Alwazae

Perjons²,

Johannesson³

2019

Knowledge Management Research & Practice

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Knowledge Management has become a key instrument for identifying, creating and sharing organizational knowledge assets. An attractive means for sharing knowledge is Best Practices (BPs), which are proven as well as efficient and effective solutions to recurring problems. BPs can offer significant benefits, including improved performance, reduced rework and cost savings. However, the implementation of BPs raises several challenges, one of which is that the low quality of BP documentation can impede the use of BPs. One way to address this challenge is by supporting designers in structuring BP documents so that they become complete, uniform and easy-to-use. This support can take the form of a BP Document Template that prescribes the structure of BP documents by defining relevant attributes for describing BPs. This paper proposes a comprehensive and practical BP Document Template for supporting the creation, use and evaluation of BP documents. The design of this template is an example of design science research including requirements elicitation, artifact development, demonstration, and evaluation. The development is based on a combination of expert interviews and a literature study using Grounded Theory, while the demonstration applies the proposed template in three real-life cases, and the evaluation is based on expert interviews. The proposed BP Document Template consolidates, integrates and extends previous work on BP documentation. It thereby offers an effective tool for BP designers, managers, and users that can support them in the design, evaluation and application of BPs.

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“…Another framework for assessing documentation adequacy is also presented in [20], the authors mainly used a predefined taxonomic structure to assess a project documentation which funded by Naval Surface Warfare Systems (NSWC). Based on their findings of the authors, there is a need for a tool and method that can automatically evaluate any software documentation quality especially for large systems.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Topic Modeling Based Solution for Confirming Software Documentation Quality

Alhindawi¹,

Al-Hazaimeh²,

Malkawi³

et al. 2016

ijacsa

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Abstract-this paper presents an approach for evaluating and confirming the quality of the external software documentation using topic modeling. Typically, the quality of the external documentation has to mirror precisely the organization of the source code. Therefore, the elements of such documentation should be strongly written, associated, and presented. In this paper, we use Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and HELLINGER DISTANCE to compute the similarities between the fragments of source code and the external documentation topics. These similarities are used in this paper to improve and advance the existing external documentation. Furthermore, these similarities can also be used for evaluating the new documenting process during the evolution phase of the software. The results show that the new approach yields state-of-the-art performance in evaluating and confirming the existing external documentations quality and superiority.

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Document quality indicators: A framework for assessing documentation adequacy

Cited by 15 publications

References 6 publications

Bootstrapping cookbooks for APIs from crowd knowledge on Stack Overflow

Bootstrapping cookbooks for APIs from crowd knowledge on Stack Overflow

Template-driven Best Practice Documentation

A Topic Modeling Based Solution for Confirming Software Documentation Quality

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