The Importance of Software Documentation in the Development and Maintenance Phases

  • Sagar Vishnubhai Sheta
Keywords: Software documentation, Code readability, Team collaboration, User-centered design, Documentation quality, Maintenance and troubleshooting

Abstract

This paper focuses on the value of documenting software the relationship between documentation and the efficiency of the development process and the usefulness of documentation in enhancing maintenance efforts. Research shows that effective documentation enhances administrative interpretable profile, shortens the time required in problem-solving, and fosters constructive cooperation, thereby boosting shorter developmental lifecycles and increasing consumer contentedness. To support elaborate documentation procedures to help achieve sustainable efficiency during software projects.

 

Author Biography

Sagar Vishnubhai Sheta

Software Developer, Lathia Investments LLC

References

[1] Ijiemr, 2024. EXPLORE HOW AI CAN BE USED TO CREATE DYNAMIC AND ADAPTIVE FRAUD RULES THAT IMPROVE THE DETECTION AND PREVENTION OF FRAUDULENT ACTIVITIES IN DIGITAL BANKING. Available at: https://www.ijiemr.org/downloads/paper/Volume-13/explore-how-ai-can-be-used-to-create-dynamic-and-adaptive-fraud-rules-that-improve-the-detection-and-prevention-of-fraudulent-activities-in-digital-banking [Accessed on: 11th November, 2024]
[2] Ijirset, 2024. Artificial Intelligence Ethics: Investigating Ethical Frameworks, Bias Mitigation, and Transparency in AI Systems to Ensure Responsible Deployment and Use of AI Technologies. Available at: https://www.ijirset.com/upload/2024/september/2_Artificial.pdf [Accessed on: 11th November, 2024]
[3] Ijasem, 2024. DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF ARDUINO-BASED COLD CONTAINER. Available at: https://www.ijasem.org/previousissue.php?year=2023&issue=3 [Accessed on: 11th November, 2024]
[4] Al-Saqqa, S., Sawalha, S. and AbdelNabi, H., 2020. Agile software development: Methodologies and trends. International Journal of Interactive Mobile Technologies, 14(11).
[5] Qian, C., Cong, X., Yang, C., Chen, W., Su, Y., Xu, J., Liu, Z. and Sun, M., 2023. Communicative agents for software development. arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.07924, 6.
[6] Hutchinson, B., Smart, A., Hanna, A., Denton, E., Greer, C., Kjartansson, O., Barnes, P. and Mitchell, M., 2021, March. Towards accountability for machine learning datasets: Practices from software engineering and infrastructure. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (pp. 560-575).
[7] Islam, A.K.M.Z. and Ferworn, A., 2020. A Comparison between Agile and traditional software development methodologies. Global Journal of Computer Science and Technology, 20(2), pp.7-42.
[8] Akhtar, A., Bakhtawar, B. and Akhtar, S., 2022. Extreme programming vs scrum: A comparison of agile models. International Journal of Technology, Innovation and Management (IJTIM), 2(2), pp.80-96.
[9] Carcary, M., 2020. The research audit trail: Methodological guidance for application in practice. Electronic Journal of Business Research Methods, 18(2), pp.pp166-177.
[10] Hou, X., Zhao, Y., Liu, Y., Yang, Z., Wang, K., Li, L., Luo, X., Lo, D., Grundy, J. and Wang, H., 2023. Large language models for software engineering: A systematic literature review. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology.
[11] Li, K., Zhu, A., Zhao, P., Song, J. and Liu, J., 2024. Utilizing deep learning to optimize software development processes. arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.13630.
[12] Zhao, J., 2020. Quantum software engineering: Landscapes and horizons. arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.07047.
[13] Qian, C., Liu, W., Liu, H., Chen, N., Dang, Y., Li, J., Yang, C., Chen, W., Su, Y., Cong, X. and Xu, J., 2024, August. Chatdev: Communicative agents for software development. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (pp. 15174-15186).
[14] Patacas, J., Dawood, N. and Kassem, M., 2020. BIM for facilities management: A framework and a common data environment using open standards. Automation in Construction, 120, p.103366.
[15] Nahar, N., Zhou, S., Lewis, G. and Kästner, C., 2022, May. Collaboration challenges in building ML-enabled systems: Communication, documentation, engineering, and process. In Proceedings of the 44th International Conference on software engineering (pp. 413-425).
[16] Zhao, J., Feng, H., Chen, Q. and de Soto, B.G., 2022. Developing a conceptual framework for the application of digital twin technologies to revamp building operation and maintenance processes. Journal of Building Engineering, 49, p.104028.
[17] Thota, M.K., Shajin, F.H. and Rajesh, P., 2020. Survey on software defect prediction techniques. International Journal of Applied Science and Engineering, 17(4), pp.331-344.
[18] Serban, A., Van der Blom, K., Hoos, H. and Visser, J., 2020, October. Adoption and effects of software engineering best practices in machine learning. In Proceedings of the 14th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM) (pp. 1-12).
[19] Xiang, Z.T. and Chin, J.F., 2021. Implementing total productive maintenance in a manufacturing small or medium-sized enterprise. Journal of Industrial Engineering and Management (JIEM), 14(2), pp.152-175.
[20] Dewi, L.J.E., Wijaya, I.N.S.W. and Seputra, K.A., 2021, March. Web-based Buleleng Regency agriculture product information system development. In Journal of Physics: Conference Series (Vol. 1810, No. 1, p. 012029). IOP Publishing.
[21] Barrane, F.Z., Ndubisi, N.O., Kamble, S., Karuranga, G.E. and Poulin, D., 2021. Building trust in multi-stakeholder collaborations for new product development in the digital transformation era. Benchmarking: An International Journal, 28(1), pp.205-228.
[22] Spring, M., Faulconbridge, J. and Sarwar, A., 2022. How information technology automates and augments processes: Insights from Artificial‐Intelligence‐based systems in professional service operations. Journal of Operations Management, 68(6-7), pp.592-618.
[23] Iwanaga, T., Usher, W. and Herman, J., 2022. Toward SALib 2.0: Advancing the accessibility and interpretability of global sensitivity analyses. Socio-Environmental Systems Modelling, 4, pp.18155-18155.
[24] Marion, T.J. and Fixson, S.K., 2021. The transformation of the innovation process: How digital tools are changing work, collaboration, and organizations in new product development. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 38(1), pp.192-215.
[25] Tan, J., Feitosa, D., Avgeriou, P. and Lungu, M., 2021. Evolution of technical debt remediation in Python: A case study on the Apache Software Ecosystem. Journal of Software: Evolution and Process, 33(4), p.e2319.
[26] Majumdar, S., Bansal, A., Das, P.P., Clough, P.D., Datta, K. and Ghosh, S.K., 2022. Automated evaluation of comments to aid software maintenance. Journal of Software: Evolution and Process, 34(7), p.e2463.
[27] Sharma, P.N., Savarimuthu, B.T.R. and Stanger, N., 2021, May. Extracting rationale for open source software development decisions—a study of python email archives. In 2021 IEEE/ACM 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) (pp. 1008-1019). IEEE.
[28] García, S., Strüber, D., Brugali, D., Berger, T. and Pelliccione, P., 2020, November. Robotics software engineering: A perspective from the service robotics domain. In Proceedings of the 28th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (pp. 593-604).
[29] Qian, C., Cong, X., Yang, C., Chen, W., Su, Y., Xu, J., Liu, Z. and Sun, M., 2023. Communicative agents for software development. arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.07924, 6.
[30] Chiozzi, G., Andolfato, L., Argomedo, J., Cano, C.D., Frahm, R., Hofer, J., Jeram, B., Kornweibel, N., Pellegrin, F., Schilling, M. and Sommer, H., 2024, July. Status of the ELT control software development. In Software and Cyberinfrastructure for Astronomy VIII (Vol. 13101, pp. 36-56). SPIE.
[31] Abdulkareem, S.A. and Abboud, A.J., 2021, February. Evaluating Python, c++, javascript, and Java programming languages based on software complexity calculator (Halstead metrics). In IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering (Vol. 1076, No. 1, p. 012046). IOP Publishing.
[32] Iwanaga, T., Usher, W. and Herman, J., 2022. Toward SALib 2.0: Advancing the accessibility and interpretability of global sensitivity analyses. Socio-Environmental Systems Modelling, 4, pp.18155-18155.
[33] Zhang, Q., Fang, C., Xie, Y., Zhang, Y., Yang, Y., Sun, W., Yu, S. and Chen, Z., 2023. A survey on large language models for software engineering. arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.15223.
[34] Liu, J., Wang, K., Chen, Y., Peng, X., Chen, Z., Zhang, L. and Lou, Y., 2024. Large language model-based agents for software engineering: A survey. arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.02977.
[35] Liu, J., Wang, K., Chen, Y., Peng, X., Chen, Z., Zhang, L. and Lou, Y., 2024. Large language model-based agents for software engineering: A survey. arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.02977.
[36] Bean, B., Bhatnagar, S., Castro, S., Meyer, J.D., Emonts, B., Garcia, E., Garwood, R., Golap, K., Villalba, J.G., Harris, P. and Hayashi, Y., 2022. CASA is the Common Astronomy Software Application for radio astronomy. Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 134(1041), p.114501.
[37] Tjanaka, B., Fontaine, M.C., Lee, D.H., Zhang, Y., Balam, N.R., Dennler, N., Garlanka, S.S., Klapsis, N.D. and Nikolaidis, S., 2023, July. my ribs: A bare-bones Python library for quality diversity optimization. In Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (pp. 220-229).
[38] Liu, H., Eksmo, S., Risberg, J. and Hebig, R., 2020, June. Emerging and changing tasks in the development process for machine learning systems. In Proceedings of the International Conference on software and System Processes (pp. 125-134).
[39] Dehaerne, E., Dey, B., Halder, S., De Gendt, S. and Meert, W., 2022. Code generation using machine learning: A systematic review. Ieee Access, 10, pp.82434-82455.
[40] Hou, X., Zhao, Y., Liu, Y., Yang, Z., Wang, K., Li, L., Luo, X., Lo, D., Grundy, J. and Wang, H., 2023. Large language models for software engineering: A systematic literature review. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology.
[41] Golendukhina, V., Lenarduzzi, V. and Felderer, M., 2022, May. What is software quality for AI engineers? Towards a thinning of the fog. In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on AI Engineering: Software Engineering for AI (pp. 1-9).
[42] Golendukhina, V., Lenarduzzi, V. and Felderer, M., 2022, May. What is software quality for AI engineers? Towards a thinning of the fog. In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on AI Engineering: Software Engineering for AI (pp. 1-9).
[43] Pavao, A., Guyon, I., Letournel, A.C., Tran, D.T., Baro, X., Escalante, H.J., Escalera, S., Thomas, T. and Xu, Z., 2023. Codalab competitions: An open-source platform to organize scientific challenges. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 24(198), pp.1-6.
[44] Mastropaolo, A., Aghajani, E., Pascarella, L. and Bavota, G., 2021, September. An empirical study on code comment completion. In 2021 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME) (pp. 159-170). IEEE.
[45] Muñoz, A.D., Monje, M.R. and Velthuis, M.G.P., 2024. Towards a set of metrics for hybrid (quantum/classical) systems maintainability. Journal of Universal Computer Science, 30(1), p.25.
[46] Lin, J., Ma, X., Lin, S.C., Yang, J.H., Pradeep, R. and Nogueira, R., 2021. Pyserini: An easy-to-use Python toolkit to support replicable IR research with sparse and dense representations. arXiv preprint arXiv:2102.10073.
[47] Wei, A., Deng, Y., Yang, C. and Zhang, L., 2022, May. Free lunch for testing: Fuzzing deep-learning libraries from open source. In Proceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering (pp. 995-1007).
[48] Ostadabbas, H., Weippert, H. and Behr, F.J., 2020. Using the synergy of the field for collecting data on-site and qgis for interactive map creation by alkis® data extraction and implementation in Postgresql for urban planning processes. The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, 43, pp.679-683.
[49] Gao, Z., Xia, X., Lo, D., Grundy, J. and Zimmermann, T., 2021, August. Automating the removal of obsolete TODO comments. In Proceedings of the 29th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (pp. 218-229).
[50] Liu, M., Fang, S., Dong, H. and Xu, C., 2021. Review of digital twin about concepts, technologies, and industrial applications. Journal of manufacturing systems, 58, pp.346-361.
Published
2024-08-04
How to Cite
Sagar Vishnubhai Sheta. (2024). The Importance of Software Documentation in the Development and Maintenance Phases. Revista Electronica De Veterinaria, 24(3), 609-618. https://doi.org/10.69980/redvet.v24i3.1391
Section
Articles