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Managing and documenting your project XML style: some potentially powerful for XML technology.

Article Excerpt
XML seems to be popping up everywhere. In this article, I'm going to touch on an often overlooked but potentially very powerful use for XML technology: XML for project management and documentation. Thanks to the open source community, there are some marvelous tools available for incorporating XML into your software development processes.

Throughout this article I refer to a project's infrastructure. I use the term infrastructure to refer to things such as a project's directory structure, developer mailing lists, build processes, deployment sites, source code configuration management, and documentation repositories. These are items that all projects deal with, but usually little thought is put into how these things are set up, structured, and communicated. This area is also overlooked when is comes to standardization. Lack of a common approach to these infrastructure items makes it difficult for developers and managers to move across projects. With each project you join, you have to get acquainted with a completely new project infrastructure. This adds an initial project learning curve for even the brightest developers and managers. Even within an organization, a common infrastructure across projects is often missing. Creating lower-level standards, such as coding standards and document templates, tends to be as mulch cross-project standardization as most organizations accomplish.

Fortunately, with the advent of XML technology and some creative work being accomplished in the open source community, a better way of managing your project's infrastructure is on the horizon. The base concept is the introduction of XML throughout a project's documentation. This can bring some powerful benefits. With XML-style documentation, you can utilize XML processing tools to automatically create Web sites and documents that bring all of your documentation together in an easy-to-access portal with very little manual effort. Placing your project documents in XML format also allows for maximum reusability. For example, an XML-formatted requirements document can be transformed into a PDF for distribution to management, transformed into HTML for quick access by all interested parties, and parsed into individual requirements for input to a test plan generator. The use of XML should eliminate the need to document anything project related more than once. The XML documents become a single source for all future uses of the information.

Taking this a step further, you could create a native XML database (using an open source XML DB such...