Does Documentation Help Maintenance?

One of the truisms of IT is that there’s never enough documentation.  But ask yourself, your scientific self, does documentation really help software maintenance, and if so, what kind exactly and how? These kinds of questions are very difficult to answer as it’s very difficult and costly to arrange controlled experiments.  Some researchers, however, have managed to execute at least small scale experiments and one such example was reported in “The Impact of UML Documentation on Software Maintenance: An Experimental Evaluation” ($) by Erik Arisholm, et al.   As is common in such...