Austin Software Process Improvement Network (A-SPIN)

Tuesday, March 19, 2002 Presentation: Just-in-Time Process Documentation, presented by Bill Riddle, TeraQuest Metrics Inc. Presentation Overview: High-quality process documentation — documentation that is complete, error-free, accurate, useful, and up-to-date — is notoriously difficult to create and evolve. Making minor changes, such as changing the name of a role, is error-prone and time-consuming. Changes to the “logic” of the process require extensive verification effort. Providing alternative views, such as a table summarizing the participation of roles in activities, exponentially increases the effort required to maintain the documentation. Documentation is often out-of-date by the time it is deployed using tradition publishing channels. At TeraQuest, we’ve developed a suite of tools and techniques supporting the development of high-quality process documentation in a matter of hours/days rather than weeks/months. Our Process Management Capability is based on: A flexible, customizable Process Architecture. Tools for capturing process descriptive information and generating documentation WebSites. Rapid-prototyping techniques for developing, tailoring and updating process documentation. In this talk, I’ll describe PMC and talk about our experiences in applying it in large, multi-national as well as small, entrepreneurial companies. I’ll also discuss the implications of PMC for increasingly important business issues such as process agility, outsourcing, geographically-distributed teams and workflow management. About the Speaker: Bill Riddle is a Solution Architect at TeraQuest Metrics Inc. As a member of TQ’s Process Management Capability development team, his activities include tool suite architecture, product line design, and training for effective use. Previously, Bill was a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at the Software Engineering Institute, Director of the Rocky Mountain Institute of Software Engineering, Chief Technical Officer at the Software Productivity Consortium, Manager of Software Engineering at Cray Laboratories, and a Professor at the Universities of Michigan and Colorado. Bill is an IEEE Fellow and recipient of the Most Influential ICSE-8 Paper Award and the 1999 ACM SigSoft Distinguished Service Award. He holds Engineering Physics and Computer Science degrees from Cornell and Stanford.