DDLC

Document Development Life Cycle - DDLC

Surprised, that a document also had a life cycle?? A software has one (known as the software development life cycle or SDLC), a bug (both creature and QA) has a life cycle so why not a document?

1. Definition: life cycle of a document starts with analyzing the situation & deciding on the actions required. Defining audience, analyzing requirements, determining media. This is a difficult but a very crucial step.
   
   
2. Design: research the audience, gather the required information, plan for each document that is required. Think of the number of copies required, printing techniques, binding/packaging, distribution, updates and frequency. How easy is it to find the information?
   
   
3. Write: hard and sweaty work of getting that first draft ready. Did you make sure the information you have captured is complete?
   
   
4. Edit: You've done the hard work of getting it all down on paper (or in the CPU in our case), now weed out the typos, grammatical errors, work on the standards and formatting.
   
   
5. Proofread: editing is what you do to your own work and proofreading is what some one else does to what you already edited, to ensure it is successful.
   
   
6. Production: You've survived the sleepless nights trying to get your docs reviewed, incorporate the feedback comments and pass the QA cycles. Now it's time to let your docs go and physically prepare them for distribution.
   
   
7. Maintenance: Track all the changes, bug fixes and feature enhancements that are planend for the next software release and update the help files and user guides to keep them uptodate.