Beyond Accuracy: Assessing Software Documentation Quality
This work addresses the need for clearer quality standards in software documentation for software engineers and developers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing quality frameworks.
The authors tackled the problem of vaguely defined 'good' software documentation by proposing a ten-dimensional framework based on data and information quality principles, and demonstrated its application through assessments by technical editors, finding that reference documentation and README files excel in quality while blog articles have more issues.
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.