Document Life Cycle

Creating technical documentation, whether for users or a development department, usually follows a certain procedure. The process of creating and maintaining documentation is subject to continuous repetition and runs in parallel to the life cycle of the documented product. In everyday documentation work we find a large variety of products, working methods and organizational forms. Even though these products vary widely, individual phases can be identified when creating documentation, that coincide with the stages of the respective product life cycle (PLC). This leads to a separate cycle of technical documentation, also referred to as the document life cycle (DLC). Individual documents or chapters of a manual required during a specific stage in the PLC can be assigned to this cycle. A DLC can also help to plan documentation projects. The following table shows an example of a PLC (not the complete PLC) and a parallel DLC with the possible documents.