TY - GEN
T1 - Hearing the Voice of Software Practitioners on Causes, Effects, and Practices to Deal with Documentation Debt
AU - Rios, Nicolli
AU - Mendes, Leonardo
AU - Cerdeiral, Cristina
AU - Magalhães, Ana Patrícia F.
AU - Perez, Boris
AU - Correal, Darío
AU - Astudillo, Hernán
AU - Seaman, Carolyn
AU - Izurieta, Clemente
AU - Santos, Gleison
AU - Oliveira Spínola, Rodrigo
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - [Context and Motivation] It is common for teams to take shortcuts during software development that, in the future, will lead to maintainability issues and affect productivity and development cost. Different types of technical debt may affect software projects, including those associated with software documentation. Although there are many studies on technical debt, few focus on documentation debt in an industrial environment. [Question/Problem] We aimed to identify how software practitioners perceive the occurrence of documentation debt in their projects. We present a combined analysis of the results from two complementary studies: a survey (InsighTD) and an interview-based case study. [Principal Ideas/Results] We provide a list of causes and effects of documentation debt, along with practices that can be used to deal with it during software development projects. [Contribution] We find that documentation debt is strongly related to requirements issues. Moreover, we propose a theoretical framework, which provides a comprehensive depiction of the documentation debt phenomenon.
AB - [Context and Motivation] It is common for teams to take shortcuts during software development that, in the future, will lead to maintainability issues and affect productivity and development cost. Different types of technical debt may affect software projects, including those associated with software documentation. Although there are many studies on technical debt, few focus on documentation debt in an industrial environment. [Question/Problem] We aimed to identify how software practitioners perceive the occurrence of documentation debt in their projects. We present a combined analysis of the results from two complementary studies: a survey (InsighTD) and an interview-based case study. [Principal Ideas/Results] We provide a list of causes and effects of documentation debt, along with practices that can be used to deal with it during software development projects. [Contribution] We find that documentation debt is strongly related to requirements issues. Moreover, we propose a theoretical framework, which provides a comprehensive depiction of the documentation debt phenomenon.
KW - Causes of documentation debt
KW - Documentation debt
KW - Effects of documentation debt
KW - InsighTD
KW - Technical debt
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85084006145&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-030-44429-7_4
DO - 10.1007/978-3-030-44429-7_4
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85084006145
SN - 9783030444280
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 55
EP - 70
BT - Requirements Engineering
A2 - Madhavji, Nazim
A2 - Pasquale, Liliana
PB - Springer
T2 - 26th International Working Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality, REFSQ 2020
Y2 - 24 March 2020 through 27 March 2020
ER -