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Troubleshooting use cases

From
Gershon Joseph
Date
2011-05-02T08:34:00+00:00
ID
Thread
Troubleshooting use cases
I've had an action for a while to knock up some use cases around troubleshooting. Here is a first draft, which I hope will stimulate some discussion to help refine and enhance the use cases. I've attached both DITA source and XHTML formats of the topic.

 Regards,
 Gershon

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Gershon L Joseph
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troubleshootingUseCases.dita
Title:  Use cases for troubleshooting documentation
Use cases for troubleshooting documentation
Introduction
This article was developed as a result of the following DITA Technical Communication
Subcommittee action item assigned to the author:
[13-Dec-2010, Troubleshooting docs] ACTION: Gershon Joseph took the action to document use
cases to share with the group as possible basis for developing markup that could be included
as specialization and/or recommended as addition.
USE CASE 1: Troubleshooting section within a task
There is often a need to include a troubleshooting section in a task, between the
<result> and <postreq>. The purpose of this section is to help the reader resolve any
problems that may arise should their result not match the result stated in the <result>
section of the task. It is expected the reader would need this problem-solving information
before reading the <postreq> section, since their is no sense in moving forward if the
expected result was not achieved.
USE CASE 2: Troubleshooting statement within a step
There is often a need to include a troubleshooting statement in a task step, following the
<stepresult>. The purpose of this  trouble  statement is to help the reader resolve any
problems that may arise should their step result not match the result stated in the
<stepresult> section of the step. Unlike use case 1, which applies to problem-solving
upon completion of the entire set of steps, this use case helps the reader resolve a problem
encountered while performing a specific step.
USE CASE 3: Troubleshooting topic
A troubleshooting topic describes how to troubleshoot a particular problem a user has
encountered. This topic typically contains the following sections, in the order shown:
Problem statement
Possible cause (one or more)

Recommended solution (one or more)
A variation of this, which is arguably more user-friendly, is the following, which groups
the cause and solution sections together:
Problem statement
Resolution path (one or more)

Each  resolution path  comprises one  possible cause  followed by one or more  recommended
solutions .
USE CASE 4: Troubleshooting document
A troubleshooting document is used to aggregate troubleshooting topics into a deliverable.
It may contain additional concept and/or reference topics, where relevant. When the
deliverable is published to an online format, the related concepts and references may be
links instead of being included as part of the deliverable.
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