Document Development Life Cycle (DDLC)

The Document Development Life Cycle (DDLC) is a sequential collection of various phases that are used by a technical writer to create a well structured and information rich technical document.

The DDLC comprises of the following stages:



Phase 1 => Requirement Analysis
Requirement Analysis is an important phase of the Document Development Life Cycle. In this phase the technical writer gathers the useful material for the project and understands and analyzes all the information of the project. He/ She analyze the project requirement, audience level, and tools that will be used in the project.  The project requirement helps to know about the type and use of the technical document. The audience level informs a technical writer about the reader level i.e. who will be the reader of the document. On the basis of the reader level complexity of the document is decided.

Technical writer must study the software from the technical point of view. He / She must use and test the software product in various ways to get the detailed idea about it. He /She should then list down all the queries and problems faced while studying the product. And before meeting and interviewing the important people, the technical writer must do his homework and prepare a questionnaire related to the project. He / She may have to meet the people many number of times to completely understand the project. At the end of this phase technical writer must have resolved all the problems and queries in terms of understanding the documentation.

Phase 2 => Designing
This phase includes the content collection and content representation that is how the content should be represented, what should be the format to represent the content, what should be page numbers for the required document, projects completion date, and so on. A technical writer has many sources to collect the content, such as his/her knowledge about the technology, audience research, Subject Matter Expert (SME), and Internet. The best source for a technical writer to collect the information is Internet and SME. Therefore, a technical writer must have good idea about the project requirement to use these resources. A good bunch of information helps a technical writer to prepare good, concise, and information rich document on the projected time.

Phase 3 => Developing
This phase the actual content is scripted on the basis of the project design, which has been created in the preceding phase. The required illustrations and graphics are also prepared and inserted in the document.

Phase 4 => Testing
This phase of DDLC involves measuring the quality of the document. A technical writer reads the scripted document to find and correct the spelling errors and maintain the data
consistency.

Phase 5 => Publishing
After fixing the all the bugs found during the testing phase, now the document is ready for publishing.

Phase 6 => Maintenance 
In this phase, technical writer backup the entire document for future use, like add the file to Configuration Management Tool (IBM Clear Case / Microsoft Visual SourceSafe).