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.
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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
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24659-6_35
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