Software design documentation approach for a DOD-STD 2167A Ada project

DOD-STD-2167A and its predecessor DOD-STD-2167 impose significant documentation requirements on software development projects. The 2167 documentation set, particularly for documenting the software design through the life cycle, contained a significant, amount of redundancy. Also, for Ada development projects, 2167 did not adequately recognize the benefits achievable from using Ada as a uniform representation of the design and code products throughout the software life cycle. DOD-STD-2167A is an improvement over 2167, but a contractor and the customer must still be conscious of the possibility of generating documents with limited utility to document producers and reviewers. This paper describes a software design documentation approach being used on the Command Center Processing and Display System Replacement (CCPDS-R) project that uses heavily tailored 2167 Data Item Descriptions (because 2167A was still in the formulation stage when CCPDS-R began) to: (1) provide reviewers with appropriate design information during the software development process; (2) provide the system user with the documentation needed to maintain the delivered software; (3) eliminate redundancy; and (4) streamline the generation of the deliverable documents through reliance on information already contained in the Software Development Files (SDFs). The resulting design document set satisfies DOD-STD-2167A requirements.