A study of the documentation essential to software maintenance
Proceedings of the 23rd annual international conference on Design of communication: documenting & designing for pervasive information
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A documentation approach has been developed to accelerate the productivity of maintenance programmers (mps). The documentation approach takes into account that the mp's level of understanding changes as more experience is gained. Four learning stages have been identified: newcomer, student, intern and expert. Both the type of information and the form in which it is presented differs, depending upon the mp's learning stage. Mps in the four stages receive respectively contextual overviews, design stories, task-oriented manuals and reference materials. This documentation approach has been used at U.S. Army TARDEC to develop a documentation suite for a software module serving as the core of ground vehicle simulation software for the Vetronics Simulation Facility. We describe the documentation suite and what we have learned over the past two years developing and using it.