User-Needs Analysis and Design Methodology for an Automated Documentation Generator

Telephone network planning engineers routinely study feeder routes within the telephone network in order to create and refine network capacity expansion (relief) plans. In doing so they make use of a powerful software tool called LEIS-PLAN. We are developing an extension to PLAN called PLANDoc that will automatically generate natural language narratives documenting the engineers’ use of PLAN. In this paper, we present the user-needs analysis and design methodology we have used in developing the PLANDoc system. We describe our interviews with various end users to determine if such a system would be desirable and what design factors would make it useful. We show how we model the system on a set of iteratively-revised human-generated narratives. The model narratives determine the function and architecture of the documentation system, and they inform the development of the system components.