Analysis of the Documentation of ERP Software Projects

Software documentation is a basic component of the software development process and it is very important in all the phases of a software system life cycle. It is plays a very important role from the point of view of both the software engineer and user. Software documentation usually includes 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always available and, if available, only partially addresses the developers' needs, as it is often wrong, incomplete, out-of-date and ambiguous. In the context of ERP - Enterprise Resource Planning, the relevance of the software documentation is even more important due to the complexity of such a kind of software systems and the strategic role they have within operative organizations. This paper focuses on the quality assessment of the documentation of ERP open source systems with the aim of understanding if they include high quality documentation for adequately support anyone want to adopt them and/or executing maintenance activities. Specifically, a quality model is defined and its application to three Open source software system is performed.