Re: Documentation Standards

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

IIRC, one of the places that had some sort of "commercial standard" was the
IEEE. However, like most orgs, they are not going to give it to you free of
charge. (What? Have they never heard of the GPL? :-) It might be available
at some nominal cost - I'd check their web site. ACM might also have some
similar standards - again, probably not available for the cost of a
download.

I used to live and breathe 2167a and I got my copies of the standard from
the company library where it was shown to a xerox machine once too often. I
don't know what sort of copyright restrictions are/were on it, but I know
that most defense contractors thought it was O.K. for their libraries to
make photocopies. Maybe you can find someone who works for a DoD related org
to show one to the xerox machine for you and drop it in the mail?

2167a got a lot of criticism from various sources, but IMHO it was not a bad
standard. Somewhere in the DIDs you had a place to file any artifact of the
software development process and with a reasonably creative interpretation
of the standard you could make for yourself just about any practical
development process you liked. You could tailor out what you didn't need
rather easily - although this was one of the criticisms - that it specified
too much and that it would be hard to get permission to tailor things out.
(We didn't have too much trouble, but some contract officers went to the Les
Miserables School Of Standards Enforcement.) If I needed to put together a
process for software development, I'd still consider 2167a a good starting
point - tailoring it to what I thought I needed - even for commercial
development.

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"John R. Strohm" <strohm@airmail.net> wrote in message
news:FB62AE96629A8FFC.96C668F31878EBAC.483E10041D85B955@lp.airnews.net...
> Back in the Middle Ages of military software development, we had
> DOD-STD-2167A and all the related Data Item Descriptions.  It used to be
> possible to go out on the Web and download a full set of same, or you
could
> get it from your friendly neighborhood company specifications and
standards
> library.  (I went through that exercise, a few times, with MIL-STD-1679,
> DOD-STD-2167, and DOD-STD-2167A.)
>
> Last I heard, DOD-STD-2167A had been dropped, and the successor project,
> DOD-STD-SDS, was terminated, with the idea being instead to use equivalent
> commercial specification standards.
>
> Does anyone know what the "equivalent" standards are, and where I can
scrape
> up a set, and how much it will cost me?  ("Free" is a very good answer:
this
> is something I'm doing on my own, rather than something my employer wants
me
> to spend time and money doing.)
>
> Alternatively, if anyone can point me at a bootleg site with the full set
> for DOD-STD-2167A, i.e., the standard and all the related DIDs, that would
> also be good.
>
> Thanks for all answers.
>
> --John R. Strohm
>
>
>