A DITA case study: Service learning, software documentation, and redesign

As a service-learning project in a graduate level technical communication class on technical manuals, Dr. Brian Still found an open-source software developer in Germany who needed documentation for his application. The class looked at various approaches to fulfilling the developerpsilas needs including wikis, Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA), XML, usability testing, and software mapping. This paper touches on the successes and challenges of the project and examines the potential for using DITA as a solution for reconstructing existing documentation.