# Guidance

Guidance is a general term for additional information related to roles, tasks, and work products. Examples of guidance are:

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- Example - A specific type of guidance that provides an example of a completed work product.

See also:
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