Reverse engineering of user documents: a pilot study

The incorporation of instructional design (ID) strategies into user software documents is investigated, and a new, reverse engineering-based, approach to the problem of determining the ID strategies that are used in the production of documents is presented. This approach disassembles the document into its individual components and relationships then uses that information to construct a high-level model of the document specification and identify the methods used to construct the document. An initial pilot study that tests the implementation of the method is also presented. In that study, responses from a selected group of evaluators are used to perform the reverse engineering of two documents for word processing programs, and a possible statistical analysis of the results is examined.