Beyond accuracy: Assessing software documentation quality
Date
2020
Authors
Treude, C.
Middleton, J.
Atapattu Mudiyanselage, T.
Editors
Devanbu, P.
Cohen, M.
Zimmermann, T.
Cohen, M.
Zimmermann, T.
Advisors
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Conference paper
Citation
Proceedings of the 28th ACM Joint Meeting European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2020), 2020 / Devanbu, P., Cohen, M., Zimmermann, T. (ed./s), pp.1509-1512
Statement of Responsibility
Christoph Treude, Justin Middleton, Thushari Atapattu
Conference Name
ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE) (8 Nov 2020 - 13 Nov 2020 : virtual online)
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.
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© 2020 Association for Computing Machinery.