Title:  A Controlled Experiment on Software Documentation Benefits and Cost

Speaker: Junji Zhi (植俊骥)

Time: 15:00, April 25, 2013

Venue: 11th floor, ISCAS Building, Beijing

Abstract:

Software documentation is an integral part of any software development process. In practice, software companies and developers often invest time and efforts on writing and maintaining documentation artifacts besides software systems. Researchers and practitioners need to assess whether documentation cost outweighs its benefit.

In this study, we attempt to evaluate the costs and benefits of documentation on aiding software maintenance tasks through a controlled experiment. 26 student subjects were recruited from iTechs Lab, ISCAS.  The subjects were partitioned into two groups.  One group had only the source code while the other had both source code and documentation available.  Each subject was asked to perform a maintenance task individually on a given legacy system. The performance aspects that we were interested in include: (1) task duration, (2) task completion percentage and (3) design consistency with the legacy system.  The talk will focus the interesting findings about the experiment.

Biography:

Junji Zhi is a visiting student at the Laboratory for Internet Technologies (iTechs), Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences.　 Junji graduated from Shenzhen University with Bachelor Degree of Software Engineering in 2011. Currently, he is pursuing his Master Degree in the Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary.  He is working with Dr. Guenther Ruhe and Dr. Vahid Garousi in the field of Software Engineering. His research interests include: Optimization of Software Documentation and Maintenance Costs, Software testing, Empirical Software Engineering, and Software Release Planning.