RE: How you take notes in SME interviews

[Monica Cellio <cellio -at- pobox -dot- com>]

I use paper and pen (never pencil), exclusively.  I rarely get through a
discussion that doesn't involve *some* non-text notations; paper gives
me the flexibility for inheritance diagrams, flow diagrams, schematics,
circles and arrows connecting points after the fact, and even
cross-outs.  The last is particularly interesting to me: if *I* got it
wrong initially then I have to be careful to make sure my reader doesn't
as well, and if the *SME* changed his mind then this is something to
follow up in the product itself.  (Perhaps the design is unclear, or it
was clear but we're using it inconsistently.  Either way, that's going
to trickle down to the users if we don't do something about it.  [Insert
standard comment about our jobs including being the proxy for the user.])

I also sometimes use different pen colors, particularly if we're
discussing what's in an interface (the signatures, class hierarchy, etc)
versus annotations about why we did it that way.  I also sometimes pull
out the red pen to draw stars next to particularly-important things to
come back to; text search doesn't always have the same impact.

Monica Cellio
Senior SDK Developer




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