Content-Based Conformance Assurance Between Software Research Documentation and Design Guideline

Research-oriented software groups are groups that carry out research on original technology for software. The groups on development phase experience poor documentation because of two reasons. One is the lack of resources (i.e. time, costs) since the development phase is much shorter than their research phase. The other one is that the artifacts they worked on research phase are rarely used on the development documents. Therefore, we propose a method that can reduce poor documentation regarding their research documents and development (R&D) documents. We construct design guidelines from best practices and represent it by queries of semantics-aware traceability links. Then, we use a semi-automated method of conformance assurance between R&D documents with guidelines. Finally, we provide an explanatory guideline to assessment results. We evaluated documents generated from our previous R&D project to show the possibility of our method. Our method can help software R&D project documents for better quality with reduced time.