Tracking changes to a (functional) design document

Question

I am looking for a good way to keep a design document up to date with the latest decisions.

We are a small team (two developers, game designer, graphic designer, project manager, sales guy). Most of our projects last a couple of months. At the start of the project a design is made but we generally find ourselves making changes or new decisions throughout the project. Most of these changes are improvements, so we want to keep our process like that. (If the changed design results in more time needed this is generally taken care of, so that part is OK)

However, at the moment we have no nice way of capturing the changes to the initial design document and this results in the initial design quickly being abandoned as a source while coding. This is of course a waste of effort.

Currently our documents are OpenOffice/Word, and the best way to track changes in those documents will probably be adding a changelist to the top of the document and making the changes in the text in parallel — not really an option I'd think as ideal.

I've looked at requirements management software, but that looks way to specialized. The documents could be stored in subversion but I think that is a bit too low level to give insight in the changes.

Does anyone know a good way to track changes like these and keep the design document a valuable resource throughout the project?

EDIT: At the moment we mostly rely on changes to the original design being put in the bugtracker, that way they are at least somewhere.

EDIT: Related question

• Is version control (ie. Subversion) applicable in document tracking?

Answer 1

I've found a wiki with revision logging works well as a step-up from Word documents, provided the number of users is relatively small. Finding one that makes it easy to make quick edits is helpful in ensuring it's kept up to date.