Abstract
A system documentation process maturity model and assessment procedure were developed and used to assess 91 projects at 41 different companies over a seven year period. During this time the original version evolved into a total of four versions based on feedback from industry and the experience gained from the assessments. This paper reports the overall results obtained from the assessments which strongly suggest that the practice of documentation is not getting a passing grade in the software industry. The results show a clear maturity gap between documentation practices concerned with defining policy and practices concerned with adherence to those policies. The results further illustrate the need to recognize the importance of improving the documentation process, and to transform the good intentions into explicit policies and actions.
This research has been funded in part by the National Commission on Scientific and Technological Research of the Government of Chile, CONICYT, through research project FONDECYT #1990845.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Card, D., McGarry, F., Page, G.: Evaluating software engineering technologies. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 13(7), 845–851 (1987)
Cook, C., Visconti, M.: Documentation is important. CrossTalk 7(11), 26–30 (1994)
Cook, C., Visconti, M.: New and improved documentation process model. In: Proceedings of the 14th Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference, Portland, Oregon, October 1996, pp. 364–380. PNSQC, Portland (1996)
Humphrey, W.: Managing the software process. Addison-Wesley, Reading (1989)
Lientz, B., Swanson, E.: Problems in applications software maintenance. Communications of the ACM 24(11), 763–769 (1981)
Paulk, M., Curtis, B., Chrissis, M., Weber, C.: The Capability Maturity Model guidelines for improving the software process. Addison-Wesley, Reading (1995)
Paulk, M., Curtis, B., Chrissis, M., Weber, C.: Capability Maturity Model, version 1.1. IEEE Software 10(4), 18–27 (1993)
Pence, J., Hon III., S.: Building software quality into telecommunications network systems. Quality Progress, 95–97 (October 1993)
Rombach, H., Basili, V.: Quantitative assessment of maintenance: an industrial case study. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Software Maintenance, Austin, Texas, September 1987, pp. 134–144. IEEE, Washington (1987)
Visconti, M., Cook, C.: A software system documentation process maturity approach to software quality. In: Proceedings of the 11th Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference, Portland, Oregon, October 1993, pp. 257–271. PNSQC, Portland (1993)
Visconti, M., Cook, C.: Evolution of a maturity model – critical evaluation and lessons learned. Software Quality Journal 7, 223–237 (1998)
Cook, C., Visconti, M.: What to do after the assessment report? In: Proceedings of the 17th Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference, Portland, Oregon, October 1999, pp. 214–228. PNSQC, Portland (1999)
Visconti, M., Cook, C.: A meta-model framework for software process modeling. In: Oivo, M., Komi-Sirviö, S. (eds.) PROFES 2002. LNCS, vol. 2559, pp. 532–545. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2004 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Visconti, M., Cook, C.R. (2004). Assessing the State of Software Documentation Practices. In: Bomarius, F., Iida, H. (eds) Product Focused Software Process Improvement. PROFES 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3009. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24659-6_35
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24659-6_35
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-21421-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-24659-6
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive