Software documentation: the practitioners' perspective

Abstract

In theory, (good) documentation is an invaluable asset to any software project, as it helps stakeholders to use, understand, maintain, and evolve a system. In practice, however, documentation is generally affected by numerous shortcomings and issues, such as insufficient and inadequate content and obsolete, ambiguous information. To counter this, researchers are investigating the development of advanced recommender systems that automatically suggest high-quality documentation, useful for a given task. A crucial first step is to understand what quality means for practitioners and what information is actually needed for specific tasks.