Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
11-2020
Abstract
Good software documentation encourages good software engineering, but the meaning of “good” documentation is vaguely defined in the software engineering literature. To clarify this ambiguity, we draw on work from the data and information quality community to propose a framework that decomposes documentation quality into ten dimensions of structure, content, and style. To demonstrate its application, we recruited technical editors to apply the framework when evaluating examples from several genres of software documentation. We summarise their assessments—for example, reference documentation and README files excel in quality whereas blog articles have more problems—and we describe our vision for reasoning about software documentation quality and for the expansion and potential of a unified quality framework.
Keywords
Quality, Software documentation
Discipline
Software Engineering
Research Areas
Software and Cyber-Physical Systems
Publication
ESEC/FSE '20: Proceedings of the 28th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering: Virtual, November 8-13
First Page
1509
Last Page
1512
ISBN
9781450370431
Identifier
10.1145/3368089.3417045
Publisher
ACM
City or Country
New York
Citation
TREUDE, Christoph; MIDDLETON, Justin; and ATAPATTU, Thushari.
Beyond accuracy: Assessing software documentation quality. (2020). ESEC/FSE '20: Proceedings of the 28th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering: Virtual, November 8-13. 1509-1512.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/8895
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1145/3368089.3417045