RE: Agile software development and effect on techwriting
I'd be very interested in knowing how many techwriters have
ever had "an extra two months at the end of the process" to
document a SW UI. I think my record for "extra time" after
the last UI change had been made in SW I was documenting
was around two weeks, and that was because of all the
non-UI background changes that were being made.
Gene Kim-Eng
------- Original Message -------
On
Tue, 13 Jan 2004 09:16:46 -0700 Solveig Haugland?wrote:
how the heck do techwriters do any docs without an extra
two months at the end of the process?
Oh, I worked at a place where we usually had extra time. The V.P. of Engineering told the CEO that they could put a Window overlay on our flagship product, a DOS HVAC control suite. I told my boss that it would only take a year and a half to write new, clean code for Windows.
A year and a half later, the Windows overlay (version 1.0) is released under pressure, with half the features that were available in the DOS version, and of those features, about 1/4 were buggy, didn't function as required, or were unreliable in function.
We actually had to remove sections from our manuals (three of the suckers) to keep pace with the devlopment team. We had 6 months of do nothing but remove information.
The development continued like that for the next 5 years. The TW's never had to worry about deadlines, the release never made its deadline. QA kept sending release candidates back until they actually had working features that worked.
Scott
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