RE: Extreme Technical Writing (was RE: Flexibility and changing r equirements)

Subject: RE: Extreme Technical Writing (was RE: Flexibility and changing r equirements)
From: Phoebe Minias <phoebe -at- MIT -dot- EDU>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2002 08:24:11 -0500

Hi Lisa,

My focus is the kind of project documentation you describe. I am the lone technical writer in the IT group that supports the Student Information System at MIT. We have a permanent client base that includes the Registrar's Office, Student Financial Services, Admissions, and other groups involved in student services. For a variety of reasons, this organization went along for years without any kind of formal structure for development or documentation. I'm part of a relatively new team that has responsibility for infrastructure issues.

We are attempting to implement a sort of agile development methodology in an environment where nothing formal has really existed before (wish us luck). The idea is to approach this from the bottom up. As part of this effort we are trying to determine what should comprise the minimum required documentation, starting from the business analysis phase through comments in the code. The hope is to keep the documentation lightweight and flexible enough so that it won't be too much of a burden to write (I will be guiding the writing in collaboration with the developers and application team leaders). We also want to write the documentation with an eye to reusability and are looking in a very preliminary way at using XML and the DITA architecture to do so.

I'm really enjoying thinking about the documentation (although it is very challenging) precisely because it needs to be so minimalist and bare-bones in approach. I've also learned a ton about software development and object-oriented analysis (I found Ambler's second edition of The Object Primer to be an excellent overview, very pragmatic, with tons of good examples).

I have also gotten a lot of great information from this list and would enjoy corresponding with anyone who's working on a similar project. (Anyone else in academia out there, besides Valerie Priester?)

Phoebe



I'm still curious: are lots of tech writers being employed writing the
kind of project documentation this site describes as the documents that
factor into agile programming? If so, are they largely more traditional
development projects, or moving toward rapid development (pick your
flavor)?

Lisa




Phoebe Minias
Documentation Lead
MIT Student Services Information Technology
Room W92-290
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139

(617) 452-2187

phoebe -at- mit -dot- edu


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