Survey: Considerations for Using DITA

Question

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 [email protected]. 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 and are repeated here:
Personal Identification
What is your name, affiliation, and name of your project?
What is your personal role in your project (e.g., author, editor, manager)?
Are you an end user, consultant, or tool vendor?
Is this a new survey response or a replacement for an earlier response?
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
What industry does your documentation represent?
What type of processing does your project involve (authoring, publishing, translating, indexing, analyzing, etc.)?
How many documents or pages do you process annually? How much of this material is new and how much revised?
How do you publish documents (paper, PDF, Web, CD, etc.)?
How many document tool users do you have?
How many people use your finished documents?
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?
Are your documents revised and republished?
General software considerations
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.
Do you have software that enforces that writers follow your organization's conventions?
Do all groups within your organization use the same tools? All people in your group?
Is authoring geographically distributed?
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?
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
For what types of documents (user manuals, online help, test plans, requirement specifications, journal articles, technical books, technical reports, interdepartmental memos, etc.)
Does your project use DITA?
Have you considered using DITA but decided not to?
Have you never considered using DITA?
Do you use DITA-inspired naming of element and attribute types when you do not use DITA itself?
Do you use DITA maps?
Do you specialize (modify) the DITA tagging scheme? How extensive are your changes? Which of the following do they involve:
Rename existing element and attribute types
Change the definitions of existing element and attribute types
Add new element and attribute types.
How many of the DITA element and attribute types do you use?
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)?
Who are the primary decision makers on DITA issues (for example, customer, consultant, manager, tools group, writers)?
Do you transform your documents to or from DITA for different types of processing? Explain.
In what circumstances would you recommend that an organization consider DITA?
What have you found surprising about DITA?
How well have the effort, elapsed time, and cost of your solution corresponded to your expectations at the beginning of the project?
How well have the results corresponded to your expectations?
Given the experience you have gained, would you make the same DITA-related decisions now?
What version(s) of DITA do you use? Are you planning to use any others? When?
What changes to DITA or the Open Toolkit would you like to see?
What changes to your processes do you plan?
Other comments
Please make any other relevant comments.

Answer 1

Arnis,
  Of course. Results will also be posted at www.txstruct.com.
        --Lynne