Assume the development environment is Unix workstations, and the documentation team uses the Macintosh platform for writing documentation. The client requires the documents to be available on Windows platforms. Developers produce the design documentation using FrameMaker. The documentation team uses Microsoft Word for the user-level documentation. The client submits corrections on hardcopies and does not need to modify the delivered documents. How could the information flow between the developers, the technical writers, and the client be set up (e.g., format, tools, etc.) such that duplication of files is minimized while everybody’s tool preferences and platform requirements are still satisfied?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

This is a simple real life question with complicated answers. Several approaches are possible, including:
• The project uses a printable format as a standard interchange format, such as Postscript or PDF (Portable Display
Format). This allows every participant to access and view documents. Only the author of a document is able to
make changes, however. This makes it difficult to move the document responsibility to move from one team to
another (e.g., from a subsystem team to the documentation team).
• The project uses an interchange format such as RTF or XML for all documents. Both formats are recognized by
recent versions of both Microsoft Word and FrameMaker. This allows document responsibilities to be transferred
between developers and technical writers. Unfortunately, this is currently not a practical solution as both tools
understanding of the interchange formats is different and imperfect, resulting in some loss of formatting.