Why Should We Make Use of Technical Documentation

Technical Documentation is the general term applied to published information of any sort which has

the sole purpose of describing the functionality, architecture as well as the handling of any product

which is either under development or currently in use. Such Technical Documentation is usually in

the form of patents (the series of unique rights which are granted to an inventor or their assignee for

a very limited time by the sovereign or head of state in exchange for the public disclosure of their

intellectual property or invention) as well as lists of components or data sheets (which summarize

the performance of the invention as well as its other technical characteristics in sufficient detail so

that a design engineer is then able to integrate certain components into a system).

Other types of Technical Documentation include ‘Test Methods’. These are definitive procedures

which are capable of procuring the results of tests. These results are then left to be considered as a

part of a technical operation to determine whether one or several characteristics of a certain

product correspond to a specified procedure. Verification and Validation are forms of Technical

Documentation in that they are independent procedures which, when used together, ensure that a

certain product or system is capable of meeting certain requirements and specifications in order to

fulfil its intended purpose.

Technical Documentation plays a very significant role in the process of developing a certain product,

service or process and there are three key types of document used during such a process. The first

type of these is System Requirements; the second, System Design, concerns the process of

identifying and defining the components, architecture, modules, interfaces and data for a system in

order for it to satisfy previously identified requirements. The third type is System Architecture (the

conceptual model which is intended to define the structure, behaviour and multiple views of a

system).

But who is the intended audience technical documentation? It is not only produced for the benefit

of the end user, such as the consumer, but also for the administrator as well as service and

maintenance technicians (in the case of a technical system). Whereas normal manuals are in a ‘cook

book’ format, the layout of Technical Documentation is intended to provide enough information so

that any user to be able to understand the inner and outer dependencies of certain products.

Technical Writers, therefore, are employed to translate the typically high and much formalized

Technical Documentation into a prose format which is very easy to read.

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