The US Army IETM-one year later

SAIC and the US Army have created a new approach to diagnostic testing that is both economical to develop and capable of tackling real world trouble shooting problems. This technology resulted in the development of a set of Interactive Electronic Technical Manuals (IETMs) for a new breed of heavy trucks also developed by the Army. The original concept was first presented in the 1993 proceedings of AutoTestCon when the IETMs were still under development and the architecture was fluid. This paper is a follow up on the completion of the project. It analyzes the effectiveness of the various multimedia techniques used in the IETM such as sound, video clips, text to speech translation, hyper-text and hyper-procedures. It also presents a series of metrics collected on the IETMs such as mass storage space requirements, authoring problems encountered and other lessons learned about developing IETMs