The Value of Software Documentation Quality

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a study on software documentation quality in practice. Goal of this study is identifying the current state of software documentation quality and used analysis techniques for determining software documentation quality. Moreover, we aim at finding out, whether there is a demand for a tool-based software documentation quality analysis approach. This approach consists of a documentation quality model and a document checking tool, as proposed in previous work. We developed an online survey and asked about 300 experts to answer it. The survey was completed by 88 experts and the overall results confirm the importance of software documentation quality as well as the need for better tool support. The survey shows that the most important quality attributes with regard to documentation quality are accuracy, clarity, consistency, readability, structuredness, and understandability. Most of these quality attributes are currently covered by our software documentation quality analysis approach; some of them (e.g., accuracy, structuredness) still need more attention, i.e. better support in our quality model and tool. Keywords-software documentation quality, role of quality in documentation, automatic evaluation of documentation qualityI.

A Topic Modeling Based Solution for Confirming Software Documentation Quality

“…A study on software documentation quality in practice was conducted and presented in [27]. The authors presented a survey which categorizes the current state of software documentation quality and employed analysis approaches for achieving software documentation quality checking process.…”

An Exploratory Study on Managing and Searching for Documents in Software Engineering Environments

“…The work of Garousi et al [5] explored how technical documentation is used and what factors impact its usefulness in practice. Plösch et al [7] assessed the most important quality attribute of software documentation via a survey. Related to search of information, Freund [4] explored what contextual factors impact the information seeking behaviour of software engineers.…”

“…Unlike previous studies and surveys that have been conducted in this field (e.g. [5,3,7]), this work has a special focus on how documents are searched for. Furthermore, previous studies usually focused on the use of technical software documentation by software engineers, while this work considers all documents that are produced and used by practitioners holding various technical and non-technical positions.…”

Collaborative Documentation Process Model

“…In software documentation, the communication inefficiency incurred by the lack of interaction and supporting tools, causes inconsistencies, loss, and ambiguities of the documents. As a result, document quality is greatly degraded [1,2]. Software documents specially require high-quality correctness, consistency, and completeness because those are used as important materials for communication, quality management, and software maintenance.…”