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Re: Xtreme Programming / Agile Development and Documentation

Subject: Re: Xtreme Programming / Agile Development and Documentation
From: Beth Agnew <beth -dot- agnew -at- senecac -dot- on -dot- ca>
Date: Sat, 19 Nov 2005 12:01:33 -0500

Use Cases and User Stories can be made as detailed and comprehensive as one wants. It just depends on how much the company believes those aspects of the process are useful. If techwriters are involved at the earliest stage of creating user stories, they have the opportunity to ensure the specifications contain enough information. It's easy enough to make a good case for techwriter involvement in user stories, if the company understands our role as user advocates. Programmers will only do cursory user stories because they see their real work as coding. Having the writer do the "writing" makes everyone happier.

Tony Markos wrote:

Heidi:

As a Technical Writer, I want as firm of a functional
specification as possible. And, of course, the most
comprehensive and rigorous functional specs are model
based.

The problem with Xtreme programming is that the
espoused functional specification technique is
something called a User Story. A User Story is kind
of like a Use Case, but is even more loosey-goosey
(i.e, lacking in built-in integration provisions and
comprehensivness checks) - and a Use Case is pretty
darn loosey-goosey!
At least a Use Case is somewhat of a modeling
technique. A User Story is typically just a few
sentences of text. (Holy forced, artifical
partitioning Batman!)
Try tying a bunch of text statements together to come
up with a comprehensive, integrated whole (to serve as
the basis for organizing your docs)!! The
understanding that a User-Story-based functional
specification is going to give me is going to be very
disjointed.

Solution? * Be aware of the issue and be able to explain it to
management.

* Wait till you have a prototype and document off of
that (vs. planning your work off of pre-prototype
deliverables).


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Re: Xtreme Programming / Agile Development and Documentation: From: Tony Markos

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