A relevance of documentation metric

Due to the character of the original source materials and the nature of batch digitization, quality control issues may be present in this document. Please report any quality issues you encounter to [email protected], referencing the URI of the item.Includes bibliographical references.Issued also on microfiche from Lange Micrographics.For years, researchers have been striving to find ways of accurately determining the maintainability of software systems. The topic has been approached in numerous ways, most often based upon determining the complexity of the system. The maintainability of a system is not a product of the program's complexity alone but is greatly affected by the ease of comprehension of the system. This is, in turn, heavily influenced by the presentation of the system and the quality of the documentation that is provided. This research is based upon a new approach to the problem of determining maintainability: that of examining the contents of the documentation and the source code with respect to each other. An initial relevance of documentation metric was implemented using pattern-matchilng techniques. The target systems for this metric were programs written using Knuth's literate programming paradigm, in which documentation and source code are tightly coupled. Problems and issues arising from this initial implementation suggest areas for future research, including the use of natural language understanding techniques combined with an analysis of the semantic structure of the code