Software Engineering Documentation Priorities: An Industrial Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper highlights the results of a survey of software professionals. The survey was conducted in the spring of 2002. The results are compiled from 50 individuals in the software field ranging from junior developers to managers and project leaders. One of the goals of this survey was to uncover how software documentation is used in industry and the extent to which, and under what circumstances, documentation can be effective. The data suggest somewhat conflicting views of the importance of documentation maintenance. In particular, participants responded that notso-up-to-date documents could still be an effective resource. Conversely, the extent to which a document is up-to-date was selected as one of the most important factors in determining its effectiveness. The results suggest that the software industry and academia may overemphasize the importance of document maintenance relative to a software professional’s tolerance of out-dated content.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.096 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".