Documentation is a vital part of both Digital Solutions and the software development in general. For software development, documentation helps you develop a clear roadmap for your application. It clearly maps from the users’ needs and wants, through possible designs, to the evaluation of your product. Documentation helps you anticipate many problems before they arise.
The documentation is vital in demonstrating many of skills that are assessed in Digital Solutions. Throughout an assessment, you will analyse the scenario to identify the users’ needs and wants, synthesize these needs to develop success criteria, user interfaces, data stores, and controlling code, and evaluate the solution to refine the it and provide recommendations for future improvements. Importantly, the documentation provides evidence of all this problem-solving. This effects your results.
Teacher’s marking considerations
QCAA has frequently provided teachers with feedback stating that documents should be easy to read, clear, relevant and easy to understand. This needs to be taken into account in the Communcating criteria, specifically visual, spoken and/or written features to communicate about a solution.
Follow these rules to ensure your documentation is eacy to understand:
Document:
Minimum font size is 11pt.
Be aware of page breaks, eg. don’t have a heading by itself on one page, and the rest of that section on a following page.
Be aware of blank space, especially in tables—you only have 10 A4 pages, so reduce the amount of wasted space.
Digrams:
Do not screen capture your diagrams, export then as an image (png preferable).
Ensure you scale diagrams to an adequate size.
Diagram text should appear no smaller than the 11pt font in the rest of the document.