Re: Agile software development and effect on techwriting

[John Cornellier <cornellier1 -at- stavanger -dot- oilfield -dot- slb -dot- com>]

Hi,

I've been involved in a few such projects recently.

> how the heck do
> techwriters do any docs without an extra two months at the end of the
> process? 

With this kind of software development, the idea is to start out with high-level concepts, get them right, then incrementally increase granularity (jargon alert!).

So first you get the main workflows sorted out (these might be documented in "use cases") then you work on the details of the UI implementation.

The doc must be developed in the same way.

As you write the doc you start out a high-level workflow like
1. Configure a project
2. Load the data
3. Quality Control the data
4. Do preprocessing
etc.

Then, as things become better defined, you become more granular. So Point 1 above expands into a discussion of creating new projects vs loading archived ones, multi-user scenarios, etc.

So rather than taking a finished product, starting at the beginning, & working through to the end, the idea is to start with the Big Picture, then fill in the details as they are established.

Another principle of Agile (rapid, etc) to do many small iterations. This is very helpful for helping the writer focus on the main objective - creating content - and be more relaxed about editing and layout issues, which can be sorted out at the end.

Also, these kinds of dev environments usually require much direct collaboration (team rooms for example) which is very helpful for getting the writer access to those who know.

John Cornellier