Documentation is critical to the success of any kind of project in any domain. Documentation helps project team to stay updated on various phases of the project and also helps company provide clear data to the customers.As like Firmware and Software, Hardware requires a thorough documentation. For a hardware project, you'll want to have thorough documentation to ensure that others can understand your project and possibly replicate it. Let us list some of the documentation required for the hardware design:
Requirements document from Marketing (can be said high level scope document for the project):
This document is provided by the marketing team or management level team after studying the market requirements, competitors, resource availability. While preparing this document, there is some feasibility analysis done and design team will also be involved.
System Requirements document:
Based on the requirements provided by management or marketing, design team starts writing the technical level requirements of the project comprising system level requirements, hardware requirements, software requirements, firmware requirements, testing and certification requirements. Requirements are clearly defined in this project along with the constraints against each requirement. This is the base document for the project development.
Project Plan document:
While the project plan at high level is prepared by the marketing or management, the design team prepares a detailed project plan listing the timelines, resources and constraints. MPP is usually used for this and some companies use excel for planning. Now a days lot of open source web based tools are available for project planning.
Design Document:
As the project is executed by the project members, there are several stake holders in the company who need to know the design criteria considered. Also, there might be a chance of employee resignation or employee changing project or changing domain and in all these cases there must be a smooth hand over of the project. The design calculations, components selection criteria, comparison analysis of various component options, thermal calculations, pin mapping of the controller/processor/FPGA on the board, block diagram, module level descriptions and functionality explanation must be part of the design document. Looking at the sections covered in this design document, we can say this document is the heart of the project.
Test Plan Document:
Testing and debugging play a very critical part in the project success. Not just completing the testing but proper testing must be done on a product. A good testing team gives lot of confidence to the entire project team at the same time creates headaches for the design team. For testing to happen thoroughly, test plan must be in place. A thorough test plan helps test engineers to thoroughly test the product. Test plan can be in different formats and most engineers prefer to have excel format. Engineers must create a detailed description of each test with equipment used. An important aspect of test plan is pass/fail criteria. A good project execution involves test engineers from the initial phase of the project and test plan evolves into a final deliverable as the phases move on. the target is to have a reviewed test plan by the time hardware is in hand.
Requirements Traceability Matrix (RTM):
Requirements traceability matrix is a document which links the requirements against execution in various phases of the project especially the testing and verification. A tag against requirement mapped to different test cases, bugs, etc is used to identify the requirement in RTM.
Test Report:
All the observations against each test case in a test plan must have a report associated with it. This helps designers and other stake holders know what the testing engineers have concluded out of the testing.
User Document/Manual:
User document is something created by the company to help customers get to know about the product. Features of the product along with some of the design details are included in this document. User document always accompanies a product in the market.
While the above list of documents are common across most companies, different companies based on product requirements and documentation standards have several additional documents. Most of the companies do hire document writer to prepare customer facing documentation.
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