Improving collaborative documentation in CMS

Complete and up-to-date documentation is essential for efficient data analysis in a large and complex collaboration like CMS. Good documentation reduces the time spent in problem solving for users and software developers. The scientists in our research environment do not necessarily have the interests or skills of professional technical writers. This results in inconsistencies in the documentation. To improve the quality, we have started a multidisciplinary project involving CMS user support and expertise in technical communication from the University of Turku, Finland. In this paper, we present possible approaches to study the usability of the documentation, for instance, usability tests conducted recently for the CMS software and computing user documentation