The documentation of quality engineering: applying use cases to drive change in software engineering models

• Authors: Ashley Williams
• Venue: Proceedings of the 22nd annual international conference on Design of communication: The engineering of quality documentation
• Year: 2004

This paper examines how documentation is used to create "quality" engineering processes in software development, focusing on recent industry trends of adopting use case driven software engineering models, to investigate a phenomenon that in this paper I call "genre dumping." The paper aims to address questions about how software development methods change under a use-case driven model. For example, is it really that easy to adopt the use case methodology? The paper draws from a 24-month case study of a small cross-disciplinary team of software designers, developers, testers, and managers who are helping build a large in-house application for a multinational financial services corporation called "Financial Capital" (pseudonym). This project was selected for study because a use case driven model was being applied to explicitly change software engineering practices: use cases were newly adopted and thus unfamiliar to those involved in the software development project. Presented are selected results of qualitative and quantitative analyses of textual and interview data. The findings are interpreted using rhetorical genre theory, which features a large and growing body of workplace research about the ways documents enable (and constrain) people to get work done. The results show that textual features of the documents of the older design methods persist in the newly adopted use cases and that readers' approaches to text-related meaning making also persist, indicating generic recurrence. The findings also show that conflict occurs at the same sites where recurrence occurs. The paper concludes with discussions of implications for technical communicators and genre theorists interested in technical communication.