Artifact: End-User
Support Material
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Materials that assist the end-user in learning, using, operating and maintaining the product. |
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Contains
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| Role: | Technical Writer |
| Optionality/Occurrence: | Typically required if the system has an user interface. |
| Templates and Reports: |
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| Examples: | |
| UML Representation: | Not applicable. |
| More Information: |
| Input to Activities: | Output from Activities: |
Purpose 
The purpose of this artifact is to guide and support the user in how to use the product.
Timing
The initial planning of End-User Support Materials begins in the Elaboration phase, as the functionality of the system begins to evolve. End-User Support Materials continue to be refined in the Construction and Transition phases, in parallel with the development of the system itself.
Responsibility
The test team or the Technical Writer role is responsible for creating and updating support material.
Tailoring
End-user support material is typically required of any system that has a interface that end-users will interact with; systems that are principally embedded and have little or no user interface may omit this artifact, although it may be applicable and useful even where API's need to be documented.
This artifact often encloses one or more of the following documents and Artifacts:
- User Guides
- Operational Guides
- Maintenance Guides
- Online demos
- Online help system
- Context-sensitive help
- Release notes
Additional Information
The end-user documentation gives instructions for using the software. Provide documentation for all types of users.
Use use cases as a basis for your user's guide.
The user manual can be written by technical writers, with input from developers, or it can be written by the test team, whose members are likely to understand the user's perspective.
A reason for allocating the user manual to the test team is that it can be generated in parallel with development and evolved early as a tangible and relevant perspective of evaluation criteria. Errors and poor solutions in the user interface and use-case model can be spotted and corrected during the early iterations of the project, when changes are cheaper.
By writing the user manual, the testers will get to know the system well before they start any full-scale testing. Furthermore, it provides a necessary basis for test plans and test cases, and for construction of automated test suites.
How early in the development cycle to begin producing the user manual depends on the type of system. Systems with complex interfaces or with a lot of user interaction will require early versions of the user manual and also early prototypes of the interface. Embedded systems with little human interface will probably not require an early start on user documentation.
