Software Engineering: Documents

This'll be a sort of abridged summary of the topic, any more information you might need, I recommend you try the book (name in bottom of the post).


In the professional realm documentation is everything (according to this book, it's probably true), lack thereof can make your job a living nightmare every time there's an update.

Even if tedious proper documentation can go a long way.

In Dines' Book there are 3 main types of documentation, each different but of equal importance.

1. Informative Documentation
2. Descriptive Documentation
3. Analysis Documentation

It can get a bit tricky trying to differentiate them so let me try to explain it.

Informative Documents are basically documents where you talk about the domain and everything involving it (like partners, place, the scope, etc) without necessarily going into detail about the technical stuff involved in your domain.

In an informative document you can find the following:


Descriptive Documents (according to the book) By a describing (or prescribing) text we mean a text
which designates and/or delineates some physically existing phenomenon, or a text which defines a concept which can be said to be an abstraction of a physically existing phenomenon. 

Though we still don't get into the nitty-gritty of how the design of the domain works.



Analysis Documents By an analysis we mean a text which proves (i.e., reasons
over), or designates, properties of some other text, or properties that are
claimed to hold between pairs of texts. As in the technical talk about the domain.

Book used for this topic: Dines Bjørner, Software Engineering, Vol 3, Springer, 2006. (short SE-V3)