Re: [GD-Design] Design Documents

[Kent Q. <ken...@co...>]

Yeah, what he said -- with one exception. I believe (having managed a
couple of large scale design doc systems) that if you have the right
tools, you can reduce or eliminate the "assign an owner" problem. 

This is NOT to say that you don't assign responsibilities for keeping
specs current, just that I've seen specs fail because the
responsibilities were placed on the wrong people because of problems
with tooling or systems.

Basically, Microsoft Word is an inadequate tool for management of
collections of related documents, or for situations where you want
multiple people to have editorial rights. Just don't go there.

We have used Lotus Notes to manage databases of related design
documents, and anyone on the team can maintain them.

If I were starting over right now, I'd probably find a way to use XML to
create a standard document format, and check the XML docs into a source
code repository, and use stylesheets to format them for viewing and
printing.

But in any case, think of your design docs as a database of related
items, rather than one big document, and impose some standard formatting
on them, and you'll be a lot happier as the design grows.

	Kent

Jamie Fowlston wrote:
> 
> We bother. Split into components: design, technical, art, etc. 
> Assign owners to different components (generally the leads). 
> It's their responsibility to keep it up to date (and to decide 
> how up to date is appropriate under the circumstances).
> 
> Sorry about being terse; finishing demo :)
> 
> Jamie
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: gam...@li...
> [mailto:gam...@li...]On Behalf Of
> Philip Harris
> Sent: 06 November 2001 14:04
> To: gam...@li...
> Subject: [GD-Design] Design Documents
> 
> Two questions about design docs.
> 
> Firstly, given that for a reasonable size project the design doc is going to
> exceed several hundred pages, how do people organise them. Single word doc,
> multiple word docs, HTML?
> 
> Secondly, are these documents kept up to date and if so how?
> 
> Or...does nobody bother with them in the first place.
> 
> Phil
> 
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