Documentation Standards and Best Practices

Contents on this page

 

 

OLE Documentation with DocBook

 

 

Types of OLE Documentation

  1. Implementation Guide Documentation - This explains how to prepare your data and install OLE.
  2. User Documentation - This explains the functional purpose of a feature and how end-users would expect to interact with the feature.
  3. Technical Documentation - This explains how a core feature is designed and built. This is of importance to core contributing developers and others who may want to extend a feature.

Implementation Guide Documentation Expectations

Content

  1. Explains steps to take to organize and load data.  Tips and case studies to assist new implementers should be included here
  2. Data tables should live here

Location

Available on the wiki, link is in the left pane navigation

User Guide Documentation Expectations

Content

  1. A description of the feature and how it would be used by an end-user of OLE
  2. Screenshots of the feature
  3. Available within the the system's help links

Location

  1. Drafts can be uploaded to the appropriate release in the Google Drive folder: OLE Documentation
  2. Final versions are available from OLE Published Documentation

Technical Guide Documentation Expectations

Content

  1. Conceptual/architectural diagram showing how the core feature was built - with explanation
    • Includes illustrating how this feature interacts or relates to other features
  2. Class diagram showing how the core feature was built - with explanation
  3. Database diagram (ER) showing how the DB was designed - with explanation
  4. A text based description of why the feature was designed the way it was
  5. Includes rules, permissions, and roles for each feature

Location

  1. See the Technical Documentation Project Plan for links to each document
  2. Links to completed documents are available with the published User Documentation

Other Documentation

Contribution Policies

Content

  1. Detailed documentation about policies and procedures that developers must follow when contributing code or documentation to Kuali OLE
  2. Explicit instructions

Location

  1. Any documentation about policies and procedures that developers must follow when contributing code or documentation to OLE should go under OLE Contribution Information

Development Team

Content

  1. Standards and best practices for developers to follow
  2. Developer's Installation guide
  3. Notes and How tos, parameters and upgrades

Location

  1. Any documentation about procedures and standards that developers must follow as part of the core team should go under OLE Project Development

Anything Else

If you aren't sure where certain types of documentation should go since you don't think it fits into any of the categories above, please email nroggeve@in.edu with your question.

Expectations of Contributing Developers

Contributing developers regardless of work type (bug, enhancement, etc), are expected to share some responsibility in documenting any new features or changes that are made, in a consistent fashion laid out by the documentation policies above.

In most cases, the contributing developer will be responsible for a basic first cut at all four types of feature based documentation.

Operated as a Community Resource by the Open Library Foundation