Technical documentation has moved from printed booklets to electronic versions that need to be updated continuously to match product development and user demands. There is an imminent need to ensure the quality of technical documentation, i.e., information that fol- lows a product.

In order to ensure the quality, it is important to be able to measure it in a constructively way. We approach technical documentation quality from a software quality perspective and rely on automated measurements and analyses. We acknowledge that it is not possible to assess quality attributes such as “ease of understanding” using automated measure- ments. We rely on visualizations as a communication medium between machines and humans, and define a visualization-based quality assess- ment approach for technical documentation.

In order to test our approach, we use it to assess the quality of 3 real- world documentations from a Swedish mobile phone manufacture, a Japanese camera manufacture, and a Swedish warship producer. The study shows that our approach can be used to identify potential quality defects. For example, we tested an unclassified subset of the warship’s technical documentation and found that 49% of it was redundant text clones. We performed the study in collaboration with a Swedish company that is in charge of creating and maintaining the 3 documentations, and they acknowledge that our approach has great potential and that our results proved helpful to them.