To document or not to document? An exploratory study on developers’ motivation to document code

Abstract

Technical debt represents the situation in a project where developers accept compromises in one dimension of a system in order to meet urgent demands in other dimensions. These compromises incur a “debt”, on which “interest” has to be paid to maintain the long-term health of the project. One of the elements of technical debt is documentation debt due to under-documentation of the evolving system. In this exploratory study, our goal is to examine the different aspects of developers’ motivation to document code. Specifically, we aim to identify the motivating and hindering aspects of documentation as perceived by the developers. The motivating aspects of code documenting we find include improving code comprehensibility, order, and quality. The hindering aspects include developers’ perception of documenting as a tedious, difficult, and time consuming task that interrupts the coding process. These findings may serve as a basis for developing guidelines toward improving documentation practices and encouraging developers to document their code thus reducing documentation debt.