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Documenting tasks:

6.1.1.1: Plan documentation
6.1.2.1: Design layout

References:

UMP glossary
Bibliography
Conventions & Notation

Task 6.1.2.1: Design documentation layout

Task goals		To develop for the project: documentation types (see below on this page) standard document layouts requirements to the contents access rules
Procedure		Project manager : Designs documentation layout. Project Manager and Developers : Conduct Technical Review of the documentation layout. The goal is to have the documentation design cleared with, and confirmed by, the developers. Project Manager : If necessary, Agrees with the project participants, others than developers, on documentation design. Participants : Propose changes.
Inputs	Programming artifacts	None
	Model	None
	Documents	None
	Checklists	None
Guides		None
Outputs	Programming artifacts	None
	Model	None
	Documents	Software Development Plan (SDP) , Documenting section Set of documentation templates
	Checklists	None
Completion criteria
Quality metrics
Milestones
Task improvement opportunity events

Project documents types

Project documentation types
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Examples of the different types of the documents:

AutoDocuments: the documents, automatically generated by the software development tools
WebDocument: information, published or presented on the project web site as a set of web pages
SolidDocument: the document, prepared by the text processor in the "to be printed" form; despite the fact that it could (and should!) be published on the project web site, it still is not a WebDocument
SimpleDocument: an e-mail message, problem report, etc.

Documents' features

Planning the project documentation layout design you should take in consideration the following:

Efforts, required to create and maintain the documentation
Inherent features of the documents of different types

Document feature to be supported	AutoDocument	WebDocument	SolidDocument	Simple Document
Accuracy and consistency	Low	High	Very high	Impossible
Editing	Low	Low (content management tool is required)	High	Low
Remote access	From low to high (depending on tools)	Low	Impossible	From impossible to low
Printing	Low	High	Low	Low
Readability	Good	Good	Excellent	Poor
Team work	From low to high (depending on tools)	Low (content management tool is required)	High	Average

"Low" is better

Basic rules of document creation / editing

The most part of the project documentation shall be automatically generated from the software models
Diagrams instead of from sheer text
Minimized formatting and presentation requirements
The information capturing technique should be used — scanned handwritten schemes instead of illustration tools; audio-capturing instead of typing, etc.