Quality library is a tool to publish interlinked documents for software products. The tool itself is a slight extension to docutils and thus utilizes reStructuredText heavily.

The intent of quality library is to raise quality of open source software, ease the use and adoption of open source software, help on usability and make world a better place. I'm not keen to use the word 'quality'. It does have too many definitions; at least one for everyone. My personal definition for quality is something, that can be measured. And something that is easy to measure is documentation. Usually there exists none. Or if there's a one it's not the one I would be looking for. Thus, this project should be able to raise quality by providing tools to make library, a set of documents around your software.

The quality library encourages to produce at least two documents for two different kind of users. These two kind of users are the end user and a developer.

The point of quality library is to provide links between documents. At some point I'll hope we could also link to the source code but let's make a step at time.:

End user           Developer

User manual <----> Architecture <--later--> source code

Links from user manual to architecture are provided simply to help end user adapt to the conceptual model. This is achieved when the user can study what actually happens under the hood. This helps on visibility of the product - an essential attribute consider by Norman [norman]_.

The existence of user manual makes it easier to design the software. If things need to be considered from end user's point of view it also helps to produce better usability for the software. This should be done before design, actually.

We can go even further. We can add bug database to the system:

End user           Developer

User manual <----> Architecture <--later--> source code
        ^            ^
        |            |
        v            v
         Bug database

This is done by adding "report a bug or misinformation or an improvement" links after each section in the user manual or architecture specification or some other document. Aslo we can add backlinks, i.e. an information from where is this section linked from.

gh-pages/
  index.rst
  documents/
    tutorial.rst
    user_manual.rst
    architecture_spec.rst
  screenshots/
  bugs/

• [norman] Donald Norman, "The Design of Everyday Things", 1988.