Keeping Up to Date
Requirements change continuously, and the team and the technical writers need to keep the technical documentation up to date at all times so that the end user works with high-quality documentation.
Changes to requirements are usually unwelcome, because they turn into a large amount of additional work:
- You have to study the requirements of the previous version, read and become familiar with the new requirements, identify the changes, and make the corresponding edits to the technical documentation.
- You have to find every section of references, instructions, help topics, and other technical documents affected by the changes in the requirements, and then correct them.
When ALM is used, these problems go away and the team frees up a great deal of time.
Maintaining technical documentation is no longer a problem for projects in which requirements change often. The system automatically stores links between project artifacts, for example between requirements and technical documentation.
In processes with upfront design
When a business or system requirement changes, the system marks the documentation sections that cover it as outdated (not current). All that remains is to filter them in the list and proceed to editing.
The system displays the changes that were made to the requirements, and all that remains is to adjust the corresponding sections of the technical documentation.
The automation described above is configurable and is achieved by linking a system action to the corresponding requirement state:
In lightweight development processes
If the team works with primary requirements, documentation is kept up to date using the function tree (impact mapping, story mapping, or epics). User stories and operational documentation are linked to functions or epics.
After a story has been implemented, ALM automatically marks as outdated the technical documentation sections linked to the function (or epic) of that story. All that remains is to open the registry of outdated sections, revise the necessary documents, and restore coverage.
This automation is also configured in the states of the User Story:
