Document Effectiveness

In my experience of being in part of development as well as testing projects, I have observed that about 50 – 60% of the effort is spent on preparing various documents like the Functional Specification, Design Specifications, technical specifications, etc. These are most of the time deliverables as part of the project along with various other artifacts. These documents may be the interim outputs which will be used to generate other deliverables / documents downstream or may be the end product itself for some projects. Almost all of the deliverables for a software testing project are also in form of documents: Test Strategy, Test Plan, Test results, Test Closure Summary Reports, etc. Unlike the development projects, where the code is the deliverable, in testing, the documents themselves are the deliverables. Each document is created based on certain inputs and assumptions, thoroughly reviewed may be multiple times, comments and corrections incorporated and finally signed off. Some documents go through many revisions based on updates received after the documents are released. Some others go through various revisions because of comments or corrections that need to be incorporated. I was wondering if there is something like a measure of the effectiveness of the document which can be assigned to each document that is a deliverable. This would help a team to track the quality of their output.

Any technical document can be evaluated for a set of attributes. The most obvious attribute for a document is the presentation and organization. The next general attribute will be the language. However, there are some other attributes which impact the downstream activities. These are: clear scope, coverage, completeness. To evaluate a document on the coverage and completeness, perhaps each section and each functionality of the document should be rated. For technical document scoring, the attributes have to be identified separately for each type of document and evaluated according.

Probably the person doing the reviews and giving the signoff for the document should rank the document for a set of attributes, which can then be given weights and a final score from each reviewer can be obtained. The average of the scores for all reviewers of the document can then be taken as the document effectiveness metrics. In addition to this, the feedback comments should be analyzed and defects related to the document classified. These should also be factored into the document effectiveness metrics. This can serve as a feedback to the author of the document so as to take corrective actions or improvement initiatives for the process as a whole.