Goals
- reduce cost of tooling
- enable multiple users and tools to interact with specifications content
Assumptions
- 'Users' assumed to be in the Specifications Editorial Committee
Requirements
| # | Title | User Story | Importance | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Authoring | ||||
| A1 | open source format | enables multiple tools to edit | Required | |
| A2 | text source format | amenable to versioning tools | Required | |
| A3 | UML-tool based | |||
| Publishing | ||||
| P1 | Single source publishing | one set of source artefacts to generate all outputs | ||
| P2 | Can generate HTML website |
Alternatives
| Tools | Source formats | Ouput formats | Table | Figure | Source code readability | Pros | Cons | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Continue with FrameMaker | Frame, MagicDraw | move to DITA, XMI | PDF, HTML | GUI | GUI | bad | |||
Move to Madcap Flare | Madcap Flare, MagicDraw | DITA, XMI | PDF, HTML, other | ||||||
| HTML authoring + MagicDraw | MagicDraw, HTML tools | XMI, HTML | HTML | ||||||
| ODF-based solution (MagicDraw) | MagicDraw, Word | Apache OpenOffice | ODF tools Achieved using MagicDraw's embedded Velocity statement approach | ODF, XMI | PDF, HTML | GUI | GUI | hard | |||
| ODF-based solution (manual) | MagicDraw, Word | Apache OpenOffice | ODF tools | ODF, XMI | GUI | GUI | hard | ||||
| Asciidoc-based solution | MagicDraw, AsciiDoctor | XMI, AsciiDoc | Character base | Need other tools to make figure. Size can be attributed. | good | well designed for publishing. | huge documents for specifications | ||
| Markdown-based solution | MagicDraw, text editor | markdown text, XMI | HTML, PDF | Character base (need extension) | Need other tools to make figure. cannot resize original figure. | good | Widely adopted to many web applications | Not well standardised yet. poorly support for publishing | need to specify implementation platform, because there are many dialects on syntax. |
| EPub based solution | brackets | HTML, CSS | EPub(Zipped HTML) | e-publishing standard | few editor to support ePub3 |
Questions
Below is a list of questions to be addressed as a result of this requirements document:
| Question | Outcome |
|---|---|