A view-based approach for improving software documentation practices

Documentation is an integral part of a software system. It contains the information that is necessary to effectively and successfully develop, use, and maintain a system. In practice, however, the creation of appropriate documentation is largely neglected. This paper investigates the reasons for this neglect and proposes an approach to improve the current situation. As the quality of documentation depends on its usage, the approach presented here realizes the software engineering principle separation of concerns to provide all documentation users with the documentation they require for performing their tasks. The approach has been empirically validated in a series of experiment and case studies of which one experiment is described here in more detail.