Re: Extreme Programming / Agile Development and documentation - Continued

[Tony Markos <ajmarkos -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

Heidi said:

I want to thank everyone who responded to my initial
post. All the feedback was very helpful. From the
feedback I received I'vesummed up that User Stories
and/or Use Cases should house what a requirement spec
used to house. Is that correct? 

Tony Markos responds:

Use Cases lack a mechanism to ensure comprehensiveness
- but at least they attempt to be a legitimate
modeling technique.  User Stories - that is little
fragments of requirements in text - are  much worse.

Heidi:

The User Stories for this project are far from being 
comprehensive. 

Tony Markos:

Sounds like you know the score.

Heidi:

They are a bunch of scribble the developers came up
with that 
make sense to them only.

Tony Markos:

They make sense only to the developers because, by
being criptic, the developers get to hide their lack
of understanding of the requirements.  Watch out -
somebody has to do the dastardly deed of coming up
with a comprehensive whole - they might be trying to
pawn this task off on someone who they preceive as not
being able to fight back - the tech writer - you.

Heidi:
 
When the project I am working on initially started the
developers and Product Manager told me all I'd need to
document this firmware project to operate printers
would be available on the Wiki pages. I learned that
was false. 

Tony Markos:

No surprise here; the prerequisit to a weak
development staff is weak management.   

Heidi:

Now I am being told I (the tech writer who is on five 
projects at the moment, need to be the SME). YIKES!
 Not possible!

Tony Markos:

Oppss, so much for my above caution - they have
already pawned off the dastardly deed upon you.  Now I
am positive that you are dealing with weak people: The
Tech Writer has too become the SME - even tho she has
had little or no end-user contact.

Heidi:

I need to propose a solution to the problem I see with
this process and hope that someone out there and guide
me to some
resources I can go to to gather  facts and offer a
solution. I am working with one of our quality
engineers  who is confirming that this method does not
work for techpubs, but if I could get articles, Web
sites, books, something thatsupports my concerns 
and offers a solution, that would be fantastic.

Tony Markos:

I have dealt with this issue alot at work. I have also
had extensive on-line discussions with the leading
requirements engineering authors and heads of systems
engineering departments at the leading universities. 
Heidi, its all in the technique employed.  Only one
requirements modeling/solicitation technique was
specifically designed to prod the analyst to achieve
comprehensiveness.  However, mention of it has been
banned from this listerv - its just too damn
convicting!  If you want me to tell you what the
technique is, let me know and I will e-mail it to you
off line.







	
		
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