Guidance
Guidance is a general term for supplemental information which can be added to
most Method and Process elements.
Adding guidance is an easy way to tailor information for specific projects.
For example a type of Guidance called a Guideline could be associated to a Work Product
that explains how your project uses that Work Product.
See Variability Associations
for more information about attaching Guidances to specific types of elements.
Guidance elements can also be associated with other guidance elements.
Types of Guidance
- Checklist - A specific type of guidance that
identifies a series of items that need to be completed or verified. Checklists
are often used in reviews such as walkthroughs or inspections.
- Concept - A specific type of guidance that outlines
key ideas associated with basic principles underlying the referenced item.
Concepts normally address more general topics than guidelines and span across
several work product and/or tasks or activities.
- Estimating Guideline -
A specific type of guidance that provides sizing measures,
or standards for sizing the work effort associated with performing a particular piece of work
and instructions for their successful use.
It may be comprised of estimation considerations and estimation metrics.
- Example - A specific type of guidance that provides
an example of a completed work product.
- Guideline - Provides additional detail on how
to perform a particular task or grouping of tasks, or that provides additional
detail, rules, and recommendations on work products and their properties.
Amongst others, it can include details about best practices and different
approaches for doing work, how to use particular types of work products, information
on different subtypes and variants of the work product and how they evolve
throughout a lifecycle, discussions on skills the performing roles should
acquire or improve upon, and measurements for progress and maturity.
- Practice - Represents a proven way or strategy
of doing work to achieve a goal that has a positive impact on work product or process quality.
Practices are defined orthogonal to methods and processes.
They could summarize aspects that impact may different parts of a method or specific process.
- Report - A predefined template of a result that
is generated on the basis of other work products as an output from some form
of tool automation. An example for a report would be a use case model survey,
which is generated by extracting diagram information from a graphical model
and textual information from documents and combines these two types of information
into a report.
- Reusable Asset - Provides a solution to a problem
for a given context. The asset may have a variability point, which is a location
in the asset that may have a value provided or customized by the asset consumer.
The asset has rules for usage which are the instructions describing how the
asset should be used.
- Supporting Material - Used as a catch all for
other types of guidance not specifically defined elsewhere. It can be related
to all kinds of content elements, including other guidance elements.
- Template - A specific type of guidance that
provides for a work product a predefined table of contents, sections, packages,
and/or headings, a standardized format, as well as descriptions how the sections
and packages are supposed to be used and completed. Templates cannot only
be provided for documents, but also for conceptual models or physical data
stores.
- Term Definition - Defines concepts and is used
to build up the Glossary. A term definition is not directly related to content
elements, but its relationship is being derived when the term is used in the
content elements description text.
- Tool Mentor - A specific type of guidance that
shows how to use a specific tool to accomplish some piece of work, either
in the context of, or independent from, a task or activity.
- White Paper - A special concept guidance that
has been external reviewed or published and can be read and understood in
isolation of other content elements and guidance.
Related Tasks