Doing things right or doing the right things? Proposing a documentation scheme for small to medium enterprises

Abstract

Coping with the initial and finest systems' functionality and performance is indeed one of the major problems nowadays, due to the rapid increase and continuous change of customer demands. Hence, it is crucial to move on with a research analysis in an attempt to identify whether documentation, the most reliable source for preserving a software system's quality over the years, is properly created, updated and used in Small to Medium Enterprises (SME) operating in small EU markets, focusing both on the development process and the maintenance activities. Henceforth, the main objective of this paper is to propose a minimum documentation set required to fulfil both the Software Engineering principles and the SME practical needs by comparing literature suggestions with empirical findings. In further support of our documentation set suggestion, we present and discuss the results of a small survey conducted in nine IToriented SME in Cyprus and Greece.