Design Choices Document Guide

The design choices document is required, but Sun's assignment instructions do not tell you what this document should look like. Many candidates don't spend much time on it and still pass. I labored over mine, but at least I got a perfect score for documentation. More important, a good design choices document helps the evaluator understand your approach to meeting the assignment's requirements.

You can use the sample design choices document in Chapter 5 or you can adapt yours to the outline of the IEEE standard 1063-1987, "Standard for Software User Documentation" (http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/std_public/description/se/). The following outline helps you ensure that you have covered all the bases:

1.	Scope
1.1	Applicability
1.2	Organization
2.	Definitions
3.	Identifying required user documents
3.1	Identifying the software
3.2	Determining the document audience
3.3	Determining the document set
3.4	Determining document usage modes
4.	User document inclusion requirements
5.	User document content requirements
5.1	Title page
5.2	Restrictions
5.3	Warranties and contractual obligations
5.4	Table of contents
5.5	List of illustrations
5.6	Introduction
5.7	Body of document
5.8	Error messages, known problems, and error recovery
5.9	Appendixes
5.10	Bibliography
5.11	Glossary
5.12	Index
6.	User document presentation requirements
6.1	Highlighting
6.2	Consistency
6.3	Terminology
6.4	Referencing related material
7.	Bibliography