My thoughts as an enterprise Java developer.

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Format for design and requirements

Do a "requirements document" and "design document" use an outdated format? Is one monolithic document the right way to handle that information? Are there better ways to handle that information?

Consider this idea:
Keep requirements/design info in a tree structure.
Support viewing the whole tree to a specific depth so that people can ignore undesired detail.
Allow ownership to be set by branch.
Allow editing each node separately so there is less chance for conflict.

2 comments:

James A. N. Stauffer said...

WordPress Hierarchical Documentation seems to have a potential solution.

Unknown said...

I like the idea of having it hierarchical, but not sure it would be as effective to hide lower levels by default, simple because it would probably never get expanded. If everything is viewable, better chance it will get skimmed. (I'm not sure that's what you were implying or not)