Beyond Accuracy: Assessing Software Documentation Quality
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.
Fri 13 NovDisplayed time zone: (UTC) Coordinated Universal Time change
01:30 - 02:00 | DocumentationResearch Papers / Visions and Reflections / Paper Presentations / Journal First / Tool Demos at Virtual room 1 | ||
01:30 2mTalk | Beyond Accuracy: Assessing Software Documentation Quality Visions and Reflections Christoph Treude University of Adelaide, Australia, Justin Middleton North Carolina State University, USA, Thushari Atapattu The University of Adelaide DOI | ||
01:33 1mTalk | Contextual Documentation Referencing on Stack Overflow Journal First Sebastian Baltes QAware GmbH and The University of Adelaide, Christoph Treude University of Adelaide, Australia, Martin P. Robillard McGill University Pre-print | ||
01:35 1mTalk | DeepCommenter: A Deep Code Comment Generation Tool with Hybrid Lexical and Syntactical Information Tool Demos Boao Li Zhejiang University, China, Meng Yan Chongqing University, Xin Xia Monash University, Xing Hu Peking University, Ge Li Peking University, David Lo Singapore Management University DOI | ||
01:37 1mTalk | Docable: Evaluating the Executability of Software Tutorials Research Papers Samim Mirhosseini North Carolina State University, USA, Chris Parnin North Carolina State University, USA DOI Pre-print | ||
01:39 1mTalk | RulePad: Interactive Authoring of Checkable Design Rules Research Papers Sahar Mehrpour George Mason University, USA, Thomas LaToza George Mason University, USA, Hamed Sarvari George Mason University, USA DOI Pre-print | ||
01:41 1mTalk | Software Documentation and Augmented Reality: Love or Arranged Marriage? Visions and Reflections Sridhar Chimalakonda Indian Institute of Technology Tirupati, Akhila Sri Manasa Venigalla IIT Tirupati, India DOI | ||
01:43 17mTalk | Conversations on Documentation Paper Presentations Akhila Sri Manasa Venigalla , Christoph Treude University of Adelaide, Australia, Sahar Mehrpour George Mason University, USA, Samim Mirhosseini North Carolina State University, USA, Sridhar Chimalakonda Indian Institute of Technology Tirupati, M: Venera Arnaoudova Washington State University | ||