I work in a large company. Two years ago, most of our FPGA developments were over budget and schedule. Management wanted us to fix this. We've been successful and today only a few FPGA developments have severe problems. As you can imagine, there's more structure and "process" in the development. However, we have tried hard to keep it reasonable and most of the developers adopt the key elements with only a little whining.
There are a few things we're still working and one of these is documentation. All of our developments have a good requirement spec and most can pick up anyone's VHDL and figure out the lower level functions. The element we're missing is the middle level documentation. To me this is a detailed block diagram with enough verbiage or whatever to describe the flow of the design and how the major functions work together. This level of documentation is not being captured in our designs and it becomes tough for another developer to pick up a design and fix anything but the most minor items. No one wants to pay for or create a document that's not immediately useful so I'd rather not force that. Rather than defining something new, I'd like some suggestions on what others do. Is there a document that can be created during the development that answers this and benefits the developer as well? Is there another way to approach this problem?
Sam