Validity of the Documentation Availability Model: Experimental Definition of Quality Interpretation

System and software documentation is a necessity when making selection and acquisition decisions, when developing new and/or improving existing system and software functionality. A proper documentation becomes even more crucial for open source systems (OSS), where, typically, stakeholders from different communities are involved. However there exist only limited or no methodology to assess documentation quality. In this paper we present a quality model and a comprehensive method to assess quality of the OSS documentation availability (DA). Our contribution is threefold. Firstly, based on the criteria defined by Kitchenham et al. we illustrate the theoretical validity of the DA model. Secondly, we execute the first step towards the empirical validity of the DA model. Finally, our work results in a comprehensive and empirically grounded interpretation model of the documentation quality.