Documentation {#1} is the availability, distribution and maintenance of appropriate and required product knowledge; documentation influences:

• Market and technical information for development, production marketing, distribution and support teams
• Research reports to justify design and technology selections
• Recorded assessment of risks, economics presumptions and market assumptions for decision makers and legal requirements
• Design and test procedures and test validation for safety, legal, standards and environmental conformance/inquiries
• Intellectual property knowledge, discoveries and records
• Design, testing, marketing, manufacturing and support processes and required procedures
• Training, installation, and handling requirements and processes
• Upgrade, bug correction procedures
• Technical, quality and handling requirements for suppliers
• Set-up and change procedures for production equipment
• Sales, pricing and customer service strategies and requirements
• Consumer processing procedures
• End-of-Life prerequisites and processes
• Tracking of product successes, failures, customer responses and production activities
• All customer documents: training, installation, calibration/test/debug, support contact information and ancillary product/maintenance/support and producer End-of-Life costs

For example, if a product is in a highly litigious category (e.g., medical equipment, automotive, toy) and there are product failures causing consumer grief, then the testing results must be clearly documented for legal, industrial and other pertinent standards organizations showing due-diligence and conformance  Lack of such documentation can be very detrimental and, ultimately, costly to the product producer.