Guidance

Guidance is a general term for supplemental information that can be added to most Method and Process elements. Guidance elements can also be associated with other guidance elements.

Adding guidance is an easy way to tailor information for specific projects. For example, a type of Guidance called a Guideline can be associated to a Work Product that explains how your project uses that Work Product. For more information about attaching Guidances to specific types of elements, see Variability Associations.

Types of guidance

Checklist
A type of guidance that identifies a series of items that need to be completed or verified. Checklists are often used in reviews, such as walkthroughs or inspections.
Concept
A type of guidance that outlines key ideas associated with basic principles underlying the referenced item. Concepts normally address more general topics than guidelines and span across several work product or tasks or activities
Estimating Guideline
A type of guidance that provides sizing measures, or standards for sizing the work effort associated with performing a particular piece of work and instructions for their successful use. It may be comprised of estimation considerations and estimation metrics.
Example
A type of guidance that provides an example of a completed work product.
Guideline
A type of guidance that provides additional detail about how to perform a particular task or grouping of tasks, or that provides additional details, rules, and recommendations about work products and their properties. Among others, a guideline can include details about best practices and different approaches for doing work, how to use particular types of work products, information about different subtypes and variants of the work product and how they evolve throughout a lifecycle, discussions about skills the performing roles should acquire or improve upon, and measurements for progress and maturity.
Practice
A type of guidance that represents a proven way or strategy of doing work to achieve a goal that has a positive impact on the work product or process quality. Practices are defined orthogonally to methods and processes. They could summarize aspects that impact may different parts of a method or specific process.
Report
A type of guidance that is a predefined template of a result that is generated on the basis of other work products as an output from some form of tool automation. An example for a report would be a use case model survey, that is generated by extracting diagram information from a graphical model and textual information from documents and combines these two types of information into a report.
Reusable Asset
A type of guidance that provides a solution to a problem for a given context. The asset may have a variability point, which is a location in the asset that might have a value provided or customized by the asset consumer. The asset has rules for usage that are the instructions describing how the asset should be used.
Supporting Material
A type of guidance that is used as a category for other types of guidance that are not specifically defined elsewhere. It can be related to all kinds of content elements, including other guidance elements.
Template
A type of guidance that provides for a work product a predefined table of contents, sections, packages, headings, a standardized format, in addition to descriptions about how the sections and packages are supposed to be used and completed. Templates cannot only be provided for documents, but also for conceptual models or physical data stores.
Term Definition
A type of guidance that defines concepts and is used to enhance the Glossary. A term definition is not directly related to content elements, but its relationship is being derived when the term is used in the content elements description text.
Tool Mentor
A type of guidance that shows how to use a specific tool to accomplish some piece of work, either in the context of, or independent from, a task or activity.
White Paper
A concept guidance that has been externally reviewed or published and can be read and understood in isolation of other content elements and guidance.