Documentation Is Important

Inaccurate, incomplete, out of date, or missing documentation is a major contributor to poor software quality. A 4-level Software System Documentation Process Model and assessment procedure whose goal is to improve the documentation process have been designed. A maturity level and documentation process profile is generated from the responses to an assessment instrument that takes only 30 minutes to complete. The profile indicates what practices the organization is doing well, what practices need improvement, and challenges to move to the next higher maturity level. This article reports promising preliminary assessment results. Fourteen projects at five organizations have been assessed. One promising data point was an organization where three projects were assessed. One project was at level 1 and the other two at level 2. During integration testing 41% of the defects found were design and requirements defects for the project at level 1 whereas only 25% of the defects were design and requirements defects for the two projects at level 2. This limited data suggests that organizations at a higher maturity discover a larger percentage of defects earlier than organizations at a lower maturity level.