Patent ID: 7565272

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for authoring a procedure associated with a computing system operation based on a complexity analysis associated with the operation and the computing system implementing the operation, comprising executing the following steps via a computer: generating a procedure associated with the computing system operation, wherein the generated procedure represents a new procedure or an edited existing procedure; extracting from the generated procedure a workflow representation of the generated procedure, the workflow representation being an annotated document documenting the overall workflow of the generated procedure and comprising one or more workflow elements of the generated procedure and one or more documentation elements of the generated procedure; and analyzing the workflow representation of the generated procedure to produce complexity analysis results, wherein at least a portion of the complexity analysis results are fed back to a procedure author for use in selectively altering the generated procedure; wherein the procedure generating step further comprises searching a documentation element repository to identify appropriate documentation and linking the documentation to the procedure or one or more elements of the procedure.