The Iteration property is a tool for the author to communicate the status of the document within its creation process. Readers get aware, how to interpret the information in the document.
Description
The Iteration property is a tool for the author to communicate the status of the document within its creation process. Readers get aware, how to interpret the information in the document.
The stages of the document development process are as follows:
| The document has just been added with basic information. This is the skeleton of a document, ready to be referenced by other documents. |
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| Information has been searched and accumulated to reach the breadth of the document. Every idea is added and may or may not contribute to the final version of the document. This is like adding topics to a mind map to expand to the full potential of the document. |
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| Pruning and selecting relevant information and giving it more structure. This removes the ideas generated by the previous stage that do not fit nicely. They may be moved to other documents, merged with other sections of the same document or discarded. |
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| The document is ready to be used (but may be enhanced in future versions). |
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| The document has been released for internal use. This will communicate to team members that the contents of the document and the implications on the team's process have been agreed on. |
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| The document has been released for third party use. This makes it visible to team members that this document had been made available to others. |
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| The document has been used formerly, but is no longer supported. The end-of-live of its use has been started to be finally removed. |
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| The document has been removed and has no relevance for the project any longer. Removed documents are still found in the attic for future reference. The reasons for the removal should be added to the document's notes. |
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If you start a new stage, change the value of the iteration property. So after you have created the document in the facade stage and you start to add additional information, set the stage to filled, until you decide you have aggregated enough. Then switch to focused to start the pruning process. If you are satisfied, tag the document as finished. If it is discussed by the team and accepted, move it to released. As soon as it is ready for delivery to third parties, tag it as production.
Once you decide the information is no longer valid in near future, signal this state by entering the deprecated state. If it is no longer valid, the document finally arrived in the end state removed.
The first four stages are based on Use Cases: Requirements in Context (Daryl Kulak, Eamonn Guiney). The authors defines those stages to iteratively develop use cases. But we think those stages also help to create documents of any type.
