NDLI: Software maintenance documentation ( SIGDOC '89 )

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Software maintenance documentation ( SIGDOC '89 )

Content Provider	ACM Digital Library
Author	Glass, R.
Abstract	When technical writers speak of software documentation, they usually speak of user manuals. Certainly there is reason for them to. User manuals produced by software people (and I am proud to count myself as a software person!) have often been so bad that a whole industry has sprung up to publish books containing information needed to supplement traditional developer-written user manuals. Technical writers have played a key role in that industry.But there is much more to software technical documentation than user manuals. Concepts are prepared and documented; requirements are derived and written into specifications; designs are created and recorded in design documents; test plans and results are documented in special test documents; and finally the as-built product is described in maintenance manuals [Glass 88].This paper is about software maintenance documentation. Although user manuals have been perhaps the most spectacular failure in software documentation, maintenance manuals may well be the most costly. Software maintenance consumes well over half of the typical software budget [Glass 81]. Of the maintenance tasks, more time is spent on understanding the software than on any other [Fjelsted 79]. The purpose of software maintenance documentation is to help software maintainers with that (enormously expensive) understanding.The state of the practice of software maintenance documentation is abysmal. There are two extremes, neither of which is satisfactory - either no software maintenance documentation is written at all because of schedule and budget pressures during development, or too much documentation is written and as the software product evolves during maintenance the documentation, because of its bulk, is allowed to become out of date and therefore worthless. In either case, the result is that there is no usable documentation to support the software maintainer.This finding is now new. Over 15 years ago [Ridge 73] stated “There is virtual unanimity in the computer industry on the importance of software [maintenance] documentation … despite this fact, it is the first of the cargo to be jettisoned on a floundering project.” The situation has changed little over the years. In [Sasso 89], a software maintainer is quoted as saying “I'm going to assume this is typical maintenance documentation, not worth the paper it's written on.”Fortunately, there are some trends at work that may counter this problem.
Starting Page	99
Ending Page	101
Page Count	3
ISBN	089791337X
DOI	10.1145/74311.74325
Language	English
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Publisher Date	1989-11-08
Publisher Place	New York
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

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