Evolution of SoftwareDocumentation Over Time : An analysis of the quality of softwaredocumentation

Abstract: Software developers, maintainers, and testers rely on documentation to understandthe code they are working with. However, software documentation is perceivedas a waste of effort because it is usually outdated. How documentation evolvesthrough a set of releases may show whether there is any relationship between timeand quality. The results could help future developers and managers to improvethe quality of their documentation and decrease the time developers use to analyzecode. Previous studies showed that documentation used to be scarce and low inquality, thus, this research has investigated different variables to check if the qualityof the documentation changes over time. Therefore, we have created a tool thatwould extract and calculate the quality of the comments in code blocks, classes,and methods. The results have agreed with the previous studies. The quality of thedocumentation is affected to some extent through the releases, with a tendency todecrease.