DOCUMENTATION OF SOFTWARE SYSTEMS

Abstract

With software being all around us, it is surprising how little the documentation of it has developed during the last decades. Software system documentation is however most critical during maintenance tasks, where tremendous amounts of time are spend understanding the software and its documentation, before the actual maintenance work can start. This paper gives a status of current documentation practices as well as a view on its quality. The purpose of this paper is to create a discussion about those practices to foster ideas for the future.