Evaluating the quality of the documentation of open source software

Software documentation is a basic component of the software development process: from the definition of the functional requirements to the maintenance phase. Software documentation refers to different types of documents that facilitates the software developer's tasks. Then, it includes the textual documentation required by the Software engineering standards, API documentation, Wiki pages and source code comments. Surveys and studies indicate that the documentation is not always available and, if available, only partially addresses the developers' needs, as it is often wrong, incomplete, out-of-date and ambiguous. This paper focuses on the quality assessment of the documentation of open source systems with the aim of understanding the support it can offer for adopting them and executing maintenance activities. Specifically, a quality model is defined and a preliminary investigation of its applicability is performed.