INTRODUCTION
This
report provides general guidance for managing the
maintenance of documentation typically used in high-tech
environments involving computers, peripherals, software,
etc. It presents an overview of various problems and
identifies techniques and procedures designed to help
management control and perform documentation
maintenance.
There is growing interest in the maintenance
of documentation.
Why?
Because
frequently more resources are required to maintain existing
documentation than to develop it in the first
place!
This
report addresses the need to use a maintenance
policy throughout the documentation's life
cycle.
The
underlying theme is that improvements in documentation
maintenance come primarily from policies, standards, and procedures enforced by
management.
There
are three major causes of increased burden of documentation
maintenance:
- Accelerating "leap-frog"
technologies
- More documentation to be
maintained
- Failure to improve methods and
tools
This
report discusses these problems and examines methods to
solve them:
- To
help reduce the cost of documentation,
- To
improve its quality and
effectiveness, and
- To
reduce incremental costs through proper
maintenance.
To
improve quality and effectiveness, it is necessary
to:
- Improve maintenance techniques and
tools
- Improve the management of
maintenance
The
next few pages address problems and frustrations associated
with:
- The
maintenance process
- Technical issues
- Management issues
After
that, we address various solutions, such as:
- Ideal
maintenance personnel
- How to
control and improve documentation
maintenance
- How to
adopt various policies, techniques, and tools
Key
words used:
- documentation maintenance
- adaptive maintenance
- corrective maintenance
- perfective maintenance
- management
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