About the machine industry life cycle table

[jonatan.lundin@citec.se]

I agree that it is better to focus on information types than document types. In general the purpose of the table is not clear; to me we are making the table to identify what types of information the machine industry spec shall support and if the existing types in DITA 1.2 are enough of not.

To identify the type of information needed for a *typical* machine product you could *simulate* an information analysis; this means to take the life cycle phases, the product components that constitutes the machine, the mandatory/optional task, the users, the context etc into consideration. 

In general DITA does not stipulate how to identify what (type) information is needed and in which order that information shall be organized. A method, is to me, is something the technical communication community is lacking.

Thus we should try to think of a *typical* machine product and identify the *typical* tasks (uses cases as jang says) that the user must/shall/can do and then the information types (instanciated as information topics in the deliverable) needed to support the user in doing the task in the different life cycles. I favor using hierarchical task analysis (HTA) as the way of identifying the user tasks.

This means that the table could have a 1) column with the life cycles (as today), a 2) column with the user optional/mandatory tasks for the *typical* machine product and a 3) column with information types supporting the user in doing the task. The column 3) is the important column where the existing types in DITA 1.2 are benchmarked to what is needed.

Then a last column could be the case where the different types of information modules (of a specific type) that goes into which documents are stated.

To find a *typical* machine product is not easy...

To reduce the table to two columns was also discussed in meeting 22th dec.

Br,
Jonatan