ASSE 2002 - Argentine Symposium in Software Engineering

Santa Fe, Argentina
September 9 - 13, 2002

Just-in-Time Process Documentation

Bill Riddle
Solution Architect
TeraQuest Metrics Inc

High-quality process documentation — documentation that is complete, error-free, accurate, useful, and up-to-date — is notoriously difficult to create and evolve. Making minor changes, such as changing the name of a role, is error-prone and time-consuming. Changes to the “logic” of the process require extensive verification effort. Providing alternative views, such as a table summarizing the participation of roles in activities, exponentially increases the effort required to maintain the documentation. Documentation is often out-of-date by the time it is deployed using tradition publishing channels.

At TeraQuest, we’ve developed a suite of tools and techniques supporting the development of high-quality process documentation in a matter of hours/days rather than weeks/months. Our Process Management Capability is based on:

A flexible, customizable Process Architecture.
Tools for capturing process descriptive information and generating documentation WebSites.
Rapid-prototyping techniques for developing, tailoring and updating process documentation.

In this talk, I’ll describe PMC and talk about our experiences in applying it in large, multi-national as well as small, entrepreneurial companies. I’ll also discuss the implications of PMC for increasingly important business issues such as process agility, outsourcing, geographically-distributed teams and workflow management.

URL:
General information about 31 JAIIO: URL: http://fierro.frsf.utn.edu.ar/investigacion/jaiio2002/
General information about SADIO: URL: http://www.sadio.org.ar/

Send mail to hleone@frsf.utn.edu.ar with questions or comments about this web site.