8.9. Checklist Here are some questions you should feel comfortable answering about your current documentation system. For the first set of questions, imagine that you've found a serious technical error in the content of a document about your own product: How do you tell someone that this error exists? Do you file a bug? Send her email? Annotate a printout? Can you easily find out who is responsible for the particular document? Where do you find the version number of each document? How do you know when to check for a corrected version? Where would you go to find the corrected version?
Some more general questions to ask yourself about your documentation environment are: Can you view and print the released documents from all the environments you work in? When do updates to the documentation appear? How is feedback from reviewers incorporated into your documentation? What sort of information do you imagine is lost or garbled during this process? When you want to resolve conflicting input from different reviewers, is there a record of who approved each change to the document? This is often available either as part of the document itself or by using an SCM tool. What file formats do you deliver to customers, and why? How long does it take to convert all the source files for your documentation to the formats that are delivered to customers? How much of the time generating the documentation is spent doing things manually that have to be repeated every time the documentation is generated? On how many different machines can you create the released versions of the documentation?
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