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John Posada reports: <<We may be talking about over 100 different document
authors... Everyone then submits their documentation to a centralized
department who does some style/template enforcement, some monitoring to make
sure that documentation that was due for a project is submitted. Their main
responsibility to roll out this documentation to the field. As soon as the
document is delivered to the field, they wipe their job, respective of that
document, is done. The problem arises when a change is made in one document,
which is referenced by other documentation, referenced by other
documentation. The first document is changed, but nothing is done to
accommodate the rippling of the change through the entire document "tree".>>
There isn't really any good solution to this problem so long as neither the
author nor the centralized department (let's call them QA) is prepared to
take responsibility for documentation updates. Probably the simplest
approach is for QA to develop an effective procedure for identifying
cross-references in a document; then, whenever a document is updated, QA
would take responsibility for scanning through all the other documents in
search of cross-references to the changed document.
Of course, that's fairly time-consuming, and because it's a manual effort,
it's prone to error. You might try something more sophisticated using a
database that contains all cross references in each document; then, when any
document changes, you can simply open the database and search for any cross
references that point to the new document. Someone's still going to have to
check that the references remain correct, though, and creating and
maintaining the database will also take some work.
--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada
Hofstadter's Law--"The time and effort required to complete a project are
always more than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's
Law."
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