System Documentation Considerations

1. System Documentation Considerations

2. System Documentation • Documentation is the process of • Collecting • Organizing • Storing • Maintaining Historical records of programs that are prepared during each phase of SDLC. • Good Documentation should have: • Availability • Objectivity • Cross Reference • Easy to maintain • Completeness

3. Principles of system documentation • System Documentation is often overlooked and underrated which is wrong as it is integral part of various phases of life cycle. • Often considered as a formality to be performed at the end of the stage. • The above things result in ineffective and poorly written and incomplete documentation which is not usable. • So documentation has to be considered important as it is major means of communication. • Documentation survives over time and remains to provide knowledge even an individual leaves the organization. • It is also written record of work and establishes design and performance criteria for project phases.

4. Care need to be taken to create good and effective documentation. • It should part of process and not written after the fact. • It is the product of all the phases. • And it should be secured i.e. unauthorized persons should not be allowed to change the documents

5. Standards used to create documents should typically address the following: • Title page, document_id, project name. • Version control information. • Names of the author, reviewer, approver. • Date of release • Version number • Change control history • Table of contents, figures and tables. • Scope of the documents. • Definitions and acronyms. • Other documents to refer. • Summary

6. Types of documentation and their importance

10. Major Plan Documents

11. Enforcing Document discipline in an organization • In order to avoid documentation to be carried out in the last discipline of documentation has to be enforced in the organization. • This implies the following: • Budget should include documentation effort. • Procedures are setup to create and review documents. • Phase is not considered complete unless the documentation is complete. • Unit test activity is also not considered complete until the test plans are well documented. • The next phase also don’t start unless the previous phase is complete including documentation.