Evaluating the Quality of the Documentation of Open Source Software

Lerina Aversano, Daniela Guardabascio, Maria Tortorella

2017

Abstract

Software documentation is a basic component of the software development process: from the definition of the functional requirements to the maintenance phase. Software documentation refers to different types of documents that facilitates the software developer’s tasks. Then, it includes the textual documentation required by the Software engineering standards, API documentation, Wiki pages and source code comments. Surveys and studies indicate that the documentation is not always available and, if available, only partially addresses the developers' needs, as it is often wrong, incomplete, out-of-date and ambiguous. This paper focuses on the quality assessment of the documentation of open source systems with the aim of understanding the support it can offer for adopting them and executing maintenance activities. Specifically, a quality model is defined and a preliminary investigation of its applicability is performed.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Aversano L., Guardabascio D. and Tortorella M. (2017). Evaluating the Quality of the Documentation of Open Source Software . In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE, ISBN 978-989-758-250-9, pages 308-313. DOI: 10.5220/0006369403080313

in Bibtex Style

@conference{enase17,
author={Lerina Aversano and Daniela Guardabascio and Maria Tortorella},
title={Evaluating the Quality of the Documentation of Open Source Software},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE,},
year={2017},
pages={308-313},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0006369403080313},
isbn={978-989-758-250-9},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE,
TI - Evaluating the Quality of the Documentation of Open Source Software
SN - 978-989-758-250-9
AU - Aversano L.
AU - Guardabascio D.
AU - Tortorella M.
PY - 2017
SP - 308
EP - 313
DO - 10.5220/0006369403080313