Documenting the software development process

• Authors: June S. Hopkins;Jean M. Jernow
• Venue: SIGDOC '90 Proceedings of the 8th annual international conference on Systems documentation
• Year: 1990

The Software Engineering Process Group (SEPG) at the Data Systems Division of Litton Systems, Inc., was given the task of documenting the software development process used within the division. This paper describes how the SEPG at Litton accomplished this task. It discusses the sources we used for guidance and describes the resulting documentation for defining the software development process and the methods and tools that support the process.After reviewing the existing software process documentation at Litton, the SEPG concluded that three separate documents were required: a revised set of Software Policies and Procedures (PPGs), a Software Engineering Handbook, and a Software Management Handbook. The SEPG established working groups to develop these documents. The working group responsible for the Software Engineering Handbook decided to develop it as a user manual for the software development process. Following Weiss' guidelines for developing a usable user manual, the working group developed storyboards for sections of the manual. A model initially developed at IBM and refined by SEI and others was used to describe the software development process as a series of work tasks, each of which has entry criteria, exit criteria, objectives, and steps to perform.Several authors developed the storyboards and the corresponding modules of the handbook. The handbook was partitioned into short modules, each of which has a topic sentence and a figure (where applicable). The result is a modular Software Engineering Handbook that is easy to read and maintain.The use of working groups and the development of the Software Engineering Handbook as a user manual proved to be efficient and effective methods for generating high quality software process documentation.