This short blog demonstrates how the Project Library feature of The Exia Process can make it easier and more efficient to gather software project documentation.

There are two key problems in software project documentation;

• how to expand on work item information in arbitrary but controlled ways,
• how to gather all that information together in a unified document repository.

The idea behind the project library in the Exia Process is first that it store any type of project documentation, (high level design, detailed design, user doc, architecture etc. ) but second (and more important) that it can tie together details from all the work items. You can now add detail to any work item in a predictable way, and as you write the detail, it’s all gathered together for you in the library.

Example 1

Objective – Ensure that High Level Design is captured for all work.

• Create a library book called High Level Design.

  
  

• When writing a user story, click Add to add documentation.
• Select “High Level Design” from the drop-down. The title defaults to [book name] – [user story name], in this case “High Level Design – Usability Details”
  
  
  
• Double-click the documentation line you just added, and edit the document page.

  
  

• The document page you just created is added to the High Level Design book. Later on you can go to this book and arrange the pages ,and add new pages. You will always be able to access this page from the user story where it was created. Vice versa you will be able to navigate from the book page to the user story.
• You can continue to add High Level Design pages to any work item. As work evolves, these will get added while the developers or project managers are thinking about them. Later this will make it much easier to pull together a complete high level design document.

Example 2

Objective – Capture Use Cases

The team has decided that user stories are not sufficiently in-depth. User stories will be used, but each user story must also be expanded into a formal Use Case.

1. Create a Use Cases book in the library.
2. Create a User Story.
3. Add Documentation.
4. Select the Use Cases book.

   
   

1. Double-click the documentation line to edit the use case for the user story.
   
   
   

    

The use case is automatically added to the Use Cases book. All use cases can be created this way, and at any time they can be organized in the Use Cases book, and supporting documentation and other use cases can be added to the book as well.

Of course multiple use cases can be added per work item.

Example 3

Objective – Capture security considerations for a highly sensitive application.

The team is working on a highly sensitive application. Security considerations are a primary concern.

1. Create a Security book in the library.
2. Mandate that every user story, bug, task and issue must have at least one documentation entry added for the Security book.
3. Later, the application could check for this condition automatically.

Summary

This short blog has demonstrated how the Project Library feature of The Exia Process can make it easier and more efficient to gather software project documentation. By gathering documentation for each work item as the project progresses, we solve two key problems; how to expand on workitem information in arbitrary but controlled ways, and how to gather all that information together in a unified document repository.