This paper presents the results of a study on software documentation quality in practice. Goal of this study is identifying the current state of software documentation quality and used analysis techniques for determining software documentation quality. Moreover, we aim at finding out, whether there is a demand for a tool-based software documentation quality analysis approach. This approach consists of a documentation quality model and a document checking tool, as proposed in previous work. We developed an online survey and asked about 300 experts to answer it. The survey was completed by 88 experts and the overall results confirm the importance of software documentation quality as well as the need for better tool support. The survey shows that the most important quality attributes with regard to documentation quality are accuracy, clarity, consistency, readability, structuredness, and understandability. Most of these quality attributes are currently covered by our software documentation quality analysis approach; some of them (e.g., accuracy, structuredness) still need more attention, i.e. better support in our quality model and tool. Keywords-software documentation quality, role of quality in documentation, automatic evaluation of documentation qualityI.

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There is empirical evidence that internal software quality, e.g., the quality of source code, has great impact on the overall quality of software. Besides well-known manual inspection and review techniques for source code, more recent approaches utilize tool-based static code analysis for the evaluation of internal software quality. Despite the high potential of code analyzers the application of tools alone cannot replace well-founded expert opinion. Knowledge, experience and fair judgment are indispensable for a valid, reliable quality assessment, which is accepted by software developers and managers. The EMISQ method (Evaluation Method for Internal Software Quality), guides the assessment process for all stakeholders of an evaluation project. The method is supported by the Software Product Quality Reporter (SPQR), a tool which assists evaluators with their analysis and rating tasks and provides support for generating code quality reports. The application of SPQR has already proved its usefulness in various code assessment projects around the world. This paper introduces the EMISQ method and describes the tool support needed for an efficient and effective evaluation of internal software quality.

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