Integrated project support environments, text generation and technical writing

Abstract

The acceptance and usability of application software is enhanced by its supporting documents. This documentation is expensive to produce, requiring a thorough understanding of the capabilities of the software, an awareness of user needs and adequate consideration of the scope and aims of individual documents. Though much effort is expended in the documentation process, texts often fail to achieve the quality required by the user community. Manuals may not reflect the workings of an application accurately or may be out of step with particular versions of the software. By attempting to write documentation for large, heterogeneous groups of users, manuals may fail to support the tasks with which particular organisations are involved and the learning requirements of particular users. Though the different types of document—from exhaustive technical specifications to quick reference sheets—are targeted to achieve different goals, their production is often simply viewed as the provision of varying amounts of the same material. This paper argues that the quality of user manuals would be improved by exploiting text generation techniques in the technical writing process. Using models of the various aspects of software production within the generation process, a tight bond is made between software and documentation. This allows manuals to be tailored to particular working practices and learning differences. The reduction in document development time afforded by text generation relaxes the traditional restriction to a single set of documentation, so that a range of bespoke, accurate user manuals becomes available with each software system. Moreover, the approach may be used to produce manuals in a range of different languages without additional translation costs.