Production and maintenance of system documentation: what, why, when and how tools should support the practice

Abstract

System documentation (SD) is undoubtedly vital as one of the sources in software understanding. Despite its importance, practitioners are often confronted with the problems related to SD. A number of tools have been introduced in order to assist documenting activities. However such tools are still not widely used because they generally fail to meet users' needs. Hence we have conducted a survey in Malaysia with the main goal to study software engineers' current practice during software development and maintenance in relation with SD based on four types of data elements: characteristic, behavior, belief and attitude. At the very outset, we need to establish what kind of tools should be introduced, why is it introduced and when or how should it be introduced to meet their needs in documenting activities. The findings of the study will argue whether it is relevant to introduce reverse engineering or a document generator tool to serve required information early in the development stage.