Re: ISO 26514 draft ready for comment [long]

[Peter Neilson <neilson -at- alltel -dot- net>]

I've only peeked at the introduction. I won't have time to
look at the whole thing until next week--I'm too busy looking
for tech-writing work and taking care of the horses. (At our
place we actually have BOTH ends of the horse.)

I'll have to take issue with the second sentence of the
introduction, though, right now, before it escapes.

  "The documentation can be the first tangible item that
  the user sees, and so influences the user’s first
  impressions of the product."

This is rarely the case. We have already talked too much about
how nobody actually reads or even picks up the user manual, and
if the product is well designed, there may not even be a user
manual. Sometimes even the help files go totally unnoticed.

I'll admit that, 20 or more years ago there was a crying need
for good documentation as a sales tool. Often the sales
force was selling vaporware, and the only way they could
show anything to the prospects was a slick prototype of
the user manual.

So the whole beast puts forth its necessity on a false premise.
Do we need anything else besides shoot it dead before it collapses
in front of us as we write and needs to be carted off before
we can start our next documentation task?

Where is my Heffalump Gun?

Gene Kim-Eng wrote: