Assessing the Documentation Development Effort in Software Projects

From the initial stages of software engineering, one of the most important practices to be carried out during the software development is a good documentation generation. Since then, this has become more and more important in the overall process of software production of any company, especially for those that have or are trying to achieve higher maturity levels. So for those organizations with a maturity level higher than CMMI level 2, or those that have to comply with the ISO 9000-3 standard, the elaboration and revision of all the components included in the project documentation need an appreciable effort from the development teams. This means that the effort estimation models will adjust this effort driver, to the most accurate precision, in order to obtain correct estimates, which will be used generically and in local environments. In order to do so, we have defined an experiment with the following objectives: To obtain the relationship between documentation effort and total development effort and to obtain updated factors for software documentation, according to the latest documentation standards and software development techniques.