Checking Consistency and Completeness of On-Line Product Manuals

Abstract

As products are growing more complex, so is their documentation. With an increasing number of product options, the diversity in service and maintenance procedures grows accordingly. This trend also holds for large-scale medical devices such as magnetic resonance (MR) tomographs. Siemens Medical Solutions has thus decided against one common on-line service handbook for all its MR tomographs. Instead, they fragment the on-line documentation into small packages, out of which a suitable subset is selected for each individual product instance. Selection of (so-called) help packages is controlled by XML terms encoding Boolean choice conditions. To assure that the set of available help packages is sufficient for all valid product instances, we developed a tool called HelpChecker that provides a transformation of XML terms to propositional logic formulas and then employs BDD-based methods to ascertain completeness of the on-line documentation and to support authors in locating any gaps. Experiments with SAT-Solvers were also made.