Program comprehension, i.e. to understand from its source code what a computer programdoes, is crucial for change and maintenance in software development. In this thesis, it is lookedfor innovative documentation techniques and tools that support program comprehension, butthat are also conform to agile values and principles – commonly, documentation is consideredcritical due to the agile value “working software over comprehensive documentation.”1 First,a research framework is developed that embodies detailed requisites for such techniques andtools. Apart from its internal use for examining techniques and tools subsequently obtainedfrom a literature search, this framework is intended to be likewise employed by software practitioners.Eventually, the findings of a series of survey studies conducted in an industrial softwareorganization for the primary purpose of evaluating the obtained techniques and tools are analyzed.Three innovative techniques that meet all requisites are revealed. These are regarded bypractitioners independently from the support of program comprehension as helpful for a changeimpact analysis conducted by non-developers. Therefore, a requisite deduced from the highestpriority in agile software development – customer satisfaction – is met. It says that a techniqueor tool has to directly induce a benefit for non-developer stakeholders besides the benefits forthem which are indirectly induced by the support of program comprehension, e.g. a potentiallyimproved source code quality. Further, the technique most beneficial for developers as well asfor non-developers among the three techniques is identified, which bases on design rationales– textual information related to the source code that states the reasons why a part of the programhas been implemented in a certain way. Secondarily, the studies revealed that the researchframework is difficult to understand for practitioners due to its unstructured form. / Program: Magisterutbildning i informatik

Software developers, maintainers, and testers rely on documentation to understandthe code they are working with. However, software documentation is perceivedas a waste of effort because it is usually outdated. How documentation evolvesthrough a set of releases may show whether there is any relationship between timeand quality. The results could help future developers and managers to improvethe quality of their documentation and decrease the time developers use to analyzecode. Previous studies showed that documentation used to be scarce and low inquality, thus, this research has investigated different variables to check if the qualityof the documentation changes over time. Therefore, we have created a tool thatwould extract and calculate the quality of the comments in code blocks, classes,and methods. The results have agreed with the previous studies. The quality of thedocumentation is affected to some extent through the releases, with a tendency todecrease.