The relevance of software documentation, tools and technologies

This paper highlights the results of a survey of software professionals. One of the goals of this survey was to uncover the perceived relevance (or lack thereof) of software documentation, and the tools and technologies used to maintain, verify and validate such documents. The survey results highlight the preferences for and aversions against software documentation tools. Participants agree that documentation tools should seek to better extract knowledge from core resources. These resources include the system's source code, test code and changes to both. Resulting technologies could then help reduce the effort required for documentation maintenance, something that is shown to rarely occur. Our data reports compelling evidence that software professionals value technologies that improve automation of the documentation process, as well as facilitating its maintenance.