Title :
The Value of Software Documentation Quality
Author :
Plosch, Reinhold ; Dautovic, Andreas ; Saft, Matthias
Author_Institution :
Bus. Inf. - Software Eng., Johannes Kepler Univ., Linz, Austria
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 understand ability. 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 quality; system documentation; document checking tool; tool-based software documentation quality analysis; Documentation; Guidelines; IEEE standards; ISO standards; Maintenance engineering; Software; automatic evaluation of documentation quality; role of quality in documentation; software documentation quality;
Conference_Titel :
Quality Software (QSIC), 2014 14th International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Dallas, TX
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4799-7197-8
DOI :
10.1109/QSIC.2014.22