A small software company was set up to market an unusual and powerful database management system (DBMS). The unique selling point of this DBMS was its ability to process large volumes of data with efficiency. It achieved this by careful design and by supporting complex data arrays as an intrinsic data type. It also provided a comprehensive set of mathematical functions that could operate on very large data arrays with the same ease and efficiency as on scalar quantities, together with a toolkit for building interactive applications.

Seeking applications to which such a product would be uniquely suited, the company developed a telecommunications network analysis tool. This used the DBMS to process the enormous data volumes that flow from internal performance reporting of networks such as cellular telephony systems.

The application proved to offer the features and power that network providers needed and became commercially successful as a result.  It was sold with a set of printed documentation written by the development engineers. However, as the product was constructed using the DBMS’s interactive interface toolkit, one of its claimed commercial strengths was its user-extensibility.  Unfortunately, no guide had been written to describe how customers’ engineering staff could adapt the application for their own purposes. Many purchasers of the software wished to do this.

Such a guide needed to go into considerably greater technical detail about the theory and operation of the software than any of the existing documentation. Without such information, the customer’s engineers could not understand the application in depth, preventing them from modifying it for their own purposes. This technical detail was not documented anywhere and existed only in the heads of a few key engineering personnel whose time was at a premium.

Using recorded interviews and customer training courses, we were able to capture the required information and then structure, draft and produce the developer’s guide, as well as update it for further product revisions. It was well received by customers’ engineering staff across the world. During the following few years the company expanded its staff, turnover and sales many times based on the success of the telecommunications network analysis tool and a number of associated add-on products.

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