Bristfällig dokumentation vid systemutveckling : En intervjustudie om hur bristfällig dokumentation i affärskritiska IT-system påverkar supportarbete

Sammanfattning: The purpose of a support organisation is to provide help and support around something. To provide help and support to users of software may involve guiding users how the software is supposed to work, investigate why the software may not work as intended or to fix software errors. A prerequisite for the support organisation to be able to provide this help and support is that it itself has a certain degree of understanding of the software. A good tool for understanding software is documentation. Well-written documentation is easy to understand, updated, correct and describes the software in a pedagogical way. This study aims to investigate which deficiencies in documentation complicates the work of a support organisation and in what way the work is made more difficult by these deficiencies. The study is in the form of a qualitative interview study, conducted at Novacura’s support organisation. To analyze the result, Documentation Process Maturity Model (Visconti & Cook, 1993), which defines different quality levels of documentation and criterias for achieving these levels, as well as previous research, has been used. The study identified eight different deficiencies in the documentation as well as eight consequences for these deficiencies. The study also showed that the documentation at Novacura is located between level 1 and 2 of the Documentation Process Maturity Model.