UT Institute of Computer Science Graduation Theses Registry

Name

Kaarel Tark

Abstract

Open source software is one of the current trends in software development. Many information systems (IS) are built more or less on OSS. The OSS development process is cheaper as the contributors do it to for free from their own interest. The background of the contributors varies, as varies their skill level. In order to have a good quality product you have to evaluate the current situation to see how to maintain or increase the quality of a product. The quality of a tool can be analysed from different aspects: code quality, tool quality or documentation quality. Our work focuses on documentation quality. There are only couple of methods how to evaluate OSS documentation quality. For our work basis we chose Documentation Availability model (DA model). This model is based on the needs of different stakeholders (product acquirer, product user, product developer and product contractor). The main limitation of the model is that it is not designed for OSS, but is rather based on the IEEE general software development standards. Therefore it does not apply completely for the OSS documentation. In this thesis we analysed and revised the DA model, based on the data of the previous research and on the data we observed at the selected OSS documentations. The revised documentation availability model (1) excludes unused completeness entries (2) includes relevant entries for example “Code commit rules”, “Building from Source” (3) adds new document types for example “Wiki”. We also enforce documentation completeness entries with the weights, which helps take into account importance of separate entries. To validate our proposal we have analysed 14 OSS products from the Business Process management and software modelling domain. The results show that the new introduced model applies to the OSS development process and can be used to evaluate OSS documentation quality more relevantly than the model used before.

Graduation Thesis language

English

Graduation Thesis type

Bachelor - Computer Science

Supervisor(s)

Raimundas Matulevičius

Defence year

2011