1993 Presentations (Communicative Events)

User-Needs Analysis and Design Methodology for an Automated Documentation Generator

Kukich, Karen; McKeown, Kathleen; Shaw, James; Robin, Jacques; Lim, J.; Morgan, N.; Phillips, J.

Telephone network planning engineers routinely study feeder routes within the telephone network in order to create and refine network capacity expansion (relief) plans. In doing so they make use of a powerful software tool called LEIS-PLAN™. We are developing an extension to PLAN called PLANDoc that will automatically generate natural language narratives documenting the engineers ’ use of PLAN. In this paper, we present the user-needs analysis and design methodology we have used in developing the PLANDoc system. We describe our interviews with various end users to determine if such a system would be desirable and what design factors would make it useful. We show how we model the system on a set of iteratively-revised human-generated narratives. The model narratives determine the function and architecture of the documentation system, and they inform the development of the system components.