Our Documentation — the 13.1 ReleaseOne of the three components of analytical software development at SAS, in addition to coding and testing, is documentation. Analytical product documentation is found in the SAS® Help and Documentation in each release, online at support.sas.com, and in downloadable PDF files. The 25 books that describe the 13.1 analytical products span 24,278 pages. In general, developers of the analytical procedures write their own documentation. "Our developers begin their documentation when they put together a proposal for a new procedure," said Bob Rodriguez, Senior R&D Director. "The overview and syntax sections take shape before we even commit to the project." Developers complete the documentation when the programming is finished, filling out their chapters with getting started, details, and examples sections. Editors Anne Baxter and Ed Huddleston The documentation development system used by the Advanced Analytics Division is based on the open-source LaTeX project and is supported by Principal Software Developer Tim Arnold. Regular revisions make the writing and documentation process more and more efficient. The SAS code used for the documentation examples is embedded in the documentation source files, enabling the examples to be rerun and the documentation to be updated with a single command. After the chapters are written or revised, technical reviews commence, including those by managers and senior staff, technical support, and external experts, who often had input into the actual software. The writers incorporate the comments from the technical reviews and then send their chapters to Senior Technical Editors Anne Baxter and Ed Huddleston. "We use a lot of red ink," said Huddleston. "Often on newer developers." There is a steady emphasis on improving writing skills and knowledge of documentation requirements in the division, and this fall we ran another series of writing review classes, taught by Baxter. In addition, Rodriguez gave seminars on developing plans for writing projects. After final corrections, HTML file reviews, and pagination, the division documentation is pulled into SAS Help and Documentation and also placed online. At that point, Arnold ensures that a new documentation track is open for the next release, and the process starts all over again. All this attention to the documentation is intended to produce information that is highly usable by our customers. "Having the developers write the documentation means it's written by people who know exactly what the software does," says Technical Support Manager Phil Gibbs. "And we provide feedback so it can be enhanced as needed to best serve our user community." Here are a few highlights of the 13.1 analytical product documentation: Bob Rodriguez and Guixian Lin share review notes
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