Quality control in software documentation: Measurement of text comprehensibility

The importance of software documentation and the effects of poor documentation in data processing are often under- rated. Little research has been published that evaluates its quality. Software quality, on the other hand, is almost a buzzword. Discussions of software documentation; however, the lite...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inInformation & management Vol. 25; no. 3; pp. 133 - 146
Main Author Lehner, Franz
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Amsterdam Elsevier B.V 1993
Elsevier Science
Subjects
Documentation quality
Exact sciences and technology
Information and communication sciences
Information and communication technologies
Information publishing, dissemination and reproduction
Information science. Documentation
Quality
Quality control
Quality measures
Readability
Sciences and techniques of general use
Scientific and technical writing
Software documentation
Text comprehensibility
Text comprehension
Text comprehension
Readability
Text comprehensibility
Documentation quality
Quality
Software documentation
Quality control
Quality measures
Quality criterion
Measurement indicator
Technical writing
Theory
Documentation
Cognition
Text
Use study
Legibility
Language comprehension
Mathematical formula
Technical information
Test
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Summary:The importance of software documentation and the effects of poor documentation in data processing are often under- rated. Little research has been published that evaluates its quality. Software quality, on the other hand, is almost a buzzword. Discussions of software documentation; however, the literature make reference to software documentation; however, the literature on the subject of software quality assurance has offered little adequate operationalization or usable instrument for quality measurement and quality control in software documentation. The paper provides a presentation of existing comprehensibility measures for texts and an inventory of available tools, a summary of experience with comprehensibility measures and tools published in the literature, the development of a tool for the computation of readability formulae, and the application of these measurement methods to software documentation in the context of an explorative case study.
ISSN:0378-7206
1872-7530
DOI:10.1016/0378-7206(93)90036-S