Article Idea:
How to maintain Technical Specs from Version to Version
suggested by Wayne Heilala on 2005/12/13
I’m a Systems Analyst who’s in charge of translating functional ‘specs’ and/or hi-level requirements into technical specifications. One of the ongoing problems that I and the rest of my peers endlessly fight with is how to maintain our tech specs as we cut new versions of software. due to overlapping project/release schedules, we are often tasked to embark on the next release’s tech spec updates, while others are still touching up the spec’ing for the last release.
Our current process is a very loose procedure whereby we cut a “NEXT_VER_TMP_SpecName” document in a separate folder, which one analyst may work on the next release’s updates. The primary spec is left available for touch-ups.
Problems:
1) Touch-ups to the last release’s spec are often lost b/c nobody updates the NEXT_VER_TMP copy.
2) Updating two specs is plain annoying.
It may be that there’s no real solution beyond formally branching our Technical Specifications in VSS, and then sucking it up and updating the appropriate versions of specs appropriately.
We don’t really branch our specs. Rather, we “Label” a point in time in a controlled doc, and can look back at a snapshot of the spec (when we HOPE it to be an accurate representation of a given release).
I’m more of a get-it-done-soon than perfect-the-system type, so my brainstorms on this subject are pretty lame. Any expert insight into this seemingly benign (but truthfully painful) problem would be much appreciated!!!
Want to see this idea turned into a story?
3 people said yes. | 0 people said no.
David Heller
2 Reputation points
Posted 2005/12/14 @ 04:19AM with
please see the thread on ok-cancel.com this week!
This is something though that I’ve realized is so specific to the context of the organizations that it is really hard to generalize. Money helps, b/c w/ money youc an get tools that help this problem a lot.
Donna Maurer
165 Reputation points
Posted 2005/12/17 @ 05:02AM with
This is just not relevant to anything I do or can see myself doing. I’m interested to see if it is something other IAs face as I consider it quite out of the realm of IA ;)
Austin Govella
496 Reputation points
Posted 2005/12/18 @ 15:00PM with
I think it’s relevant. In my world (and I might be reading Wayne wrong) functional specs are driven by the research and synthesis part of the process.
Tracking the a design’s functional specifications is a headache. I’m constantly forgetting why one feature was omitted and another was included.
It’d be great if Wayne could offer some experience or a system for keeping them organized.