Documentation Standards Framework

This document defines the standards and artifact types that underpin the Cleanroom Labs specification process.

IEEE Standards Alignment

Each project’s technical documents are loosely modeled on IEEE standards for structure and content guidance:

These standards serve as structural guides, not strict compliance targets. The projects adopt the general document outline (Introduction, Scope, Definitions, etc.) while keeping content lean and MVP-focused.

Artifact Type Schema

The Cleanroom Labs project suite uses 6 sphinx-needs directive types to represent engineering artifacts:

Directive

Prefix

Color

Purpose

usecase

UC

Blue

User stories and workflow descriptions

req

FR

Orange

Functional requirements

nfreq

NFR

Dark Orange

Non-functional requirements (performance, security, etc.)

spec

DS

Yellow

Design specifications

impl

IMPL

Purple

Code implementations (future)

test

TC

Green

Test cases

For detailed descriptions of each artifact type and the traceability chain that connects them, see Specification Overview.

How Standards Are Applied

Each project maintains three standards-informed documents:

  • SRS — found at requirements/srs.rst in each project submodule

  • SDD — found at design/sdd.rst in each project submodule

  • Test Plan — found at testing/plan.rst in each project submodule

These documents follow the general structure of their respective IEEE standards while remaining adapted to the scale of the projects. For the technical details of authoring and linking specification artifacts, see the Sphinx Needs Usage Guide.

See Also