Document analysis involves analyzing documents for specific purposes like requirements gathering, risk identification, test case development, forensic analysis, claims etc. For example;
- In projects, contract and statement of work reviews are conducted rigorously during the pre-initiation and initiation phases. This will help to identify the inconsistencies if any, that may lead to risks later.
- As a good practice, traceability matrix is prepared to link the scope of work to requirements, scope and design documents. It gets extended further into construction, testing and release as well.
- In software engineering, rigorous requirements reviews are conducted to identify those requirements which are ambiguous. One will not be able to write test cases against such requirements and that can lead to scope and quality related risks subsequently. Any requirement for which we are unable to write a proper test case is an ambiguous requirement, hence a risk. With this as the intent, if one analyse the requirements document, many requirements related risks can be unearthed. So, is the case with design documents, for that matter all project related documents.
- Work breakdown structure reviews are conducted to identify those work packages which does not have sufficient information to work out realistic costs.
- In forensic analysis, project documents are analysed to create substantiate claims made in projects.
Even while preparing this document, some software applications are analyzing this document almost real time for readability and search engine optimization. There are other applications which does the spell check and grammatical errors. There automated content development applications as well. All these can be considered as the emerging trends in document analysis.