Survey: Considerations for Using DITA (plain text version)

[Lynne A. Price]

I apologize to those of you who were not able to read the HTML version
of this message sent the other day. I hope this one is more readable.
         --Lynne



Survey: Considerations for Using DITA

To help potential users decide whether to use DITA and how much
effort doing so would involve, Text Structure Consulting, Inc.
is conducting a survey to better understand the documentation
projects for which DITA is appropriate. If you are using or
considering DITA (or have done so), please take the time to
share your experience by completing the survey. Partial and
anonymous responses are welcome. You can send your response
(embedded in an email message, in Microsoft Word, RTF, Adobe
FrameMaker, or PDF) to 
<mailto:dita.survey at txstruct.com>dita.survey at txstruct.com. If you prefer
to answer by phone, you can write to the same address to
schedule an interview.

Please forward the survey to other documentation professionals
you know who might like to participate. If you are involved in
multiple relevant projects or would like to add to an earlier
response, feel free to complete the survey multiple times.
Answers from different people working on the same project will
gladly be received.

Since the survey is being distributed largely by forwarded email,
statistically significant results are not expected. Nevertheless,
survey responses should help existing users re-evaluate their
projects and possibly learn about new tools, potential users
evaluate the relevance of DITA, and consultants decide when
to recommend it. If an interesting number of responses are
received, the results will be summarized on www.txstruct.com
and submitted for possible presentation at Balisage: The Markup
Conference in early August, 2010 (see www.balisage.org). If at
all possible, please respond by June 15 so that information can
be prepared for the conference.

The survey questions are available at:
<http://www.txstruct.com/dita.survey/questions.htm>http://www.txstruct.com/dita.survey/questions.htm 

and are repeated here:

Personal Identification

  1. What is your name, affiliation, and name of your project?

  2. What is your personal role in your project (e.g., author,
   editor, manager)?

  3. Are you an end user, consultant, or tool vendor?

  4. Is this a new survey response or a replacement for an earlier
   response?

  5. Do you give permission for your responses to be quoted in a
   summary of the results of this survey? Do you want such
   quotations to be anonymous or attributed to you?

Project Identification

  6. What industry does your documentation represent?

  7. What type of processing does your project involve (authoring,
   publishing, translating, indexing, analyzing, etc.)?

  8. How many documents or pages do you process annually? How much
   of this material is new and how much revised?

  9. How do you publish documents (paper, PDF, Web, CD, etc.)?

10. How many document tool users do you have?

11. How many people use your finished documents?

12. Are your documents translated to multiple languages or localized
   in any other form? Are all documents localized or only some?
   How many languages do you support?

13. Are your documents revised and republished?

General software considerations

14. What documentation software does your project use:? Consider
    DITA-specific tools, XML tools, content management, word
    processing, desktop publishing, text editors, database
    management, project management, spreadsheets, and any other
    relevant tools.

15. Do you have software that enforces that writers follow your
    organization's conventions?

16. Do all groups within your organization use the same tools?
    All people in your group?

17. Is authoring geographically distributed?

18. How are editing tasks assigned to individual writers or
    editors? For example, is a writer responsible for a document
    or document component through multiple revisions, or is an
    available writer assigned whenever a change is needed? Do
    writers need specific expertise, such as knowledge of a
    documented product, to maintain particular pieces of content?

19. Do you reuse all or parts or your documents? What size units
    do you reuse? In how many documents does a typical reusable
    component occur? What percentage of a typical document is
    comprised of reusable segments?

DITA Considerations

20. For what types of documents (user manuals, online help,
    test plans, requirement specifications, journal articles,
    technical books, technical reports, interdepartmental memos,
    etc.)

    a. Does your project use DITA?

    b. Have you considered using DITA but decided not to?

    c. Have you never considered using DITA?

21. Do you use DITA-inspired naming of element and attribute
    types when you do not use DITA itself?

22. Do you use DITA maps?

23. Do you specialize (modify) the DITA tagging scheme? How
    extensive are your changes? Which of the following do
    they involve:

    a. Rename existing element and attribute types

    b. Change the definitions of existing element and attribute
       types

    c. Add new element and attribute types

24. How many of the DITA element and attribute types do you use?

25. What were the primary factors in deciding whether to use DITA
    (for example, eliminates need to define a tagging scheme,
    availability of DITA open toolkit, a DITA deliverable is part
    of the project, wanted to use DITA- based software, recommended
    by consultant, addresses usability, effort required)?

26. Who are the primary decision makers on DITA issues (for example,
    customer, consultant, manager, tools group, writers)?

27. Do you transform your documents to or from DITA for different
    types of processing? Explain.

28. In what circumstances would you recommend that an organization
    consider DITA?

29. What have you found surprising about DITA?

30. How well have the effort, elapsed time, and cost of your solution
    corresponded to your expectations at the beginning of the project?

31. How well have the results corresponded to your expectations?

32. Given the experience you have gained, would you make the same
    DITA-related decisions now?

33. What version(s) of DITA do you use? Are you planning to use any
    others? When?

34. What changes to DITA or the Open Toolkit would you like to see?

35. What changes to your processes do you plan?

Other comments

36. Please make any other relevant comments.


Lynne A. Price
DITA Survey
Text Structure Consulting, Inc.
Specializing in structured FrameMaker consulting, application development, 
and training
dita.survey at txstruct.com    http://www.txstruct.com
voice/fax: (510) 583-1505   cell phone: (510) 421-2284