Using Traceability Links to Assess and Maintain the Quality of Software Documentation
Denys Poshyvanyk, Andrian Marcus · 2007
The paper proposes an approach for using traceability links to assess and maintain the quality of software documentation. Our position is that quality documentation should accurately reflect the structure of the source code; hence elements of documentation that link to strongly coupled elements of the source code should also be strongly related. We use latent semantic indexing (LSI) to compute similarities among sections of external documentation. Coupling measures are used to assess the strength of the dependencies among source code elements. The proposed methodology compares the similarities among parts of documentation (e.g., requirements, user manuals) to the coupling among the parts of the source code (e.g., classes) they are linked to. These measures can be used to improve existing documentation or new one during the evolution of the software.