To discover and explore schemes and algorithms for semi-automating quality assurance on large and complex texts. SGML only supports internal structural consistency checks, and did not provide sufficient support. An approach is needed to allow testing documentation against previous versions and against software, by content, format, and structure. A scheme based on successively marking text, extracting lists, and substituting information was developed. The first coding scheme worked well for English but could not handle French (accented characters). A new coding scheme was developed.
1. A methodology based both on files (information representation) and tasks (information transformations) was developed and explored. The common approach is based on tasks and resources, but does not handle information and knowledge.
2. A quality assurance scheme was developed looking both at internal consistency of the information and at the correspondence between small information chunks (components of the document) and software. The information extraction and comparison tasks were automated with software tools and utilities, and with lists.
3. A list based information insertion - transformation scheme was conceptualized and explored for automated maintenance and transformation tasks.