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Documentation is an integral part of any software system. This thesis investigates the reasons for the prevailing neglect of documentation and proposes an approach to improve the current situation. The dissertation proposes a view-based software documentation approach which enables the organization-wide reuse of documentation practices in different software projects an organization performs. This reuse enables easy and rapid adaptations to certain project characteristics since it allows an organization to focus on the differences in project characteristics. The common aspects of the different projects with respect to documentation can be covered by reusing well-known and established practices. A quality model for software documentation was developed to support view-based software documentation. It enables the assessment of the quality of a given documentation and its underlying documentation schema. The impact of a view-based approach on the quality of software documentation has been empirically validated by means of a series of experiments. The average completeness of produced and maintained documentation was increased between 14 % and 37 % by a proper documentation schema that makes explicit the different concerns the documentation elements address and the relationships among these elements. The correctness as well as the subjective usability could also be improved. The experiments also showed that the difference in quality between more and less experienced participants can be reduced by a proper documentation schema. View-based software documentation was also applied in several industrial projects. The industrial application presented in this thesis demonstrated the improvement of the quality of an existing documentation in terms of the information it provides and in terms of general usability. This was achieved by customizing the documentation schema to the project context.