Platform for Technical Documentation and Knowledge Management in Product Development

Purpose and goal

We verified the hypothesis that structured documentation techniques can be simplified and laid out the constraints for such a simplification. We also verified that it can be embedded in an authoring system and used for contribution. Importantly it maintains compatibility with existing tools. The central deliverable reached concept grade and was informally validated with potential customers. It meets our goal on being maintainable but not yet on being production ready. Through interview studies we confirmed interest in the product outside our current market.

Results and expected effects

We produced a concept application demonstrating how Technical Documentation can be offered to a broader user base that will contribute to structured content; Reviewers, Authors and Translators. It demonstrates how authors can be assisted to deliver consistent content using an up-to-date translation memory. This combined with Pretranslate tools will dramatically reduce translation costs. Furthermore we researched integration of these software components into interactive Knowledge Management tools. This can potentially expand the market for structured documentation.

Approach and implementation

Our recruitment strategy failed due to a shortage of applicants for our thesis positions. Lesson learned is to start recruitment earlier or work tighter with the university. The project itself was well carried out and co-operation between parties was a success. Communication and timing alignment between project bodies was challenging, extending delivery time, but successful. Another element of delay was that none of the existing 3rd party frameworks we evaluated provided the simplification we set out to deliver. The approach we had to chose was to develop the framework ourselves.