Quality control in software documentation: Measurement of text comprehensibility

• Published in: Information & management Vol. 25; no. 3; pp. 133 - 146
• Main Author: Lehner, Franz
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• 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
• DOI: 10.1016/0378-7206(93)90036-S
• ISSN: 0378-7206

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.