FW: Documenting desktop to Web application?

[John Posada <JPosada -at- book -dot- com>]

>You're exactly right in both your posts.  The client 
>doesn't know exactly what the whole system does.  
>Different employees know different aspects, but no 
>one person understands the whole thing.  The client 
>knows this.  That's why they want me to document it.  
>But what they're asking for is a User's Guide.  

Leanne...The following suggestion...mind if I repost it to the list?

Try this:

Instead of documenting the system as a user from the system's perspective,
try doing it from a user's perspective. In UML, these are called "Use
Cases", though this is going to be a hybrid. The reason for hybrid is that a
use case doesn't care about system or application details...it's the process
from the user's perspective, and you're going to include
application-specific steps. It's actually closer to small online help
topics, but on paper.

For example...from a system's perspective, to do a 'something", say
"maintain an Account", you go through a series of steps. Many times, this
series of steps is 10-15 steps or more.

Instead, think of that procedure as a combination of multiple smaller
discrete steps:

1) Create a new account (4 steps)
2) Perform a name change for an existing account (4 steps)
3) Perform a name change for an existing account (6 steps)
4) Delete an account (3 steps)

Document at this level. Each small process can be banged out relatively
quickly, and since it might take a half-day end to end for each one, you can
have multiple steps under review while you are creating more. 

Because each set of steps is small, it also takes care of the problem of no
one person knowing everything...each of these small steps must be known by
someone.

Now, you may have 20 small processes for Account Maintenance. So what...a
diagram of the process may be half-page and the written, another page or
two.

What do you think?

John Posada
Information Hunter-Gatherer
Special Projects; Information Technology
Barnes&Noble.com
NY: 212-414-6656 


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