I am looking for information on using system dynamics as
an interactive tool to review and guide the evolution of project
documentation. My application area is the documentation developed as
part of a software engineering project.
My premise is that the project and its documentation are
equivalent representations of the same thing. Thus I believe that
evolving the documentation schema & content along with the project
product is necessary to have a successful project. I believe that when
the documentation has the same utility as the item it describes then the
project is completed.
What prompted this is a request to review a collection
of documents that purport to:
1 - represent things we want to know about the product
2 - be useful in managing the development, replication
process for the product
3 - be useful after the product is deployed.
To make meaningful comments I thought it would be useful
to understand how the documentation supports and may in fact be one and
the same thing as developing, replicating and supporting the product.
That is consistency of the documentation without concern for it being
synonymous with the product in the physical world has little to no
value.
Pete
<pbeck@pica.army.mil>
Software documentation as part of the system
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Software documentation as part of the system
Pete,
With SD you may describe different methods of document production. Some
of todays programming toolsets include the methodology for
documentation. In fact, products like Popkin Software and Rose provide
for a variety of documentation methods. A somewhat large set of methods
may be reviewed through some of the Universal Modeling Language (UML)
books.
SD would be appropriate to study the ramifications of the different
methods. This would probably be a discrete event system (DES model) as
the process is usual described in workflow terms. As a DES,
optimization would be extensive as closed form solutions dont exist.
Although optimization methodologies are studied, it ends up being an
exhaustive search by trial and error. But these are only relevant if
optimization is pursued.
Base cases can be compared with SD, thus for a given project or
categories of projects, tradeoffs can be quantified.
Sounds fun.
Ray
With SD you may describe different methods of document production. Some
of todays programming toolsets include the methodology for
documentation. In fact, products like Popkin Software and Rose provide
for a variety of documentation methods. A somewhat large set of methods
may be reviewed through some of the Universal Modeling Language (UML)
books.
SD would be appropriate to study the ramifications of the different
methods. This would probably be a discrete event system (DES model) as
the process is usual described in workflow terms. As a DES,
optimization would be extensive as closed form solutions dont exist.
Although optimization methodologies are studied, it ends up being an
exhaustive search by trial and error. But these are only relevant if
optimization is pursued.
Base cases can be compared with SD, thus for a given project or
categories of projects, tradeoffs can be quantified.
Sounds fun.
Ray