Re: Agile, SCRUM and Technical Writing

Subject: Re: Agile, SCRUM and Technical Writing
From: Ned Bedinger <doc -at- edwordsmith -dot- com>
To: Peter Neilson <neilson -at- windstream -dot- net>
Date: Sat, 17 Feb 2007 00:21:32 -0800

A few comments embedded below.

Peter Neilson wrote:

Lemme try to think through what might be going on here. We can divide software projects up into various binary categories:

1(a/b). Have (or do not have) a good insight on a product and a good team.
2(a/b). Perform (or do not perform) early documentation of plans and designs.
3(a/b). Produce (or do not produce) a successful product.

1b rarely leads to 3a, I'm sure, regardless of what is done with 2. Including a large number of badly conceived projects in a study will indeed show that documentation efforts do not help. "You can't wash sh*t," as a fellow TW once said.

I'd qualify this a little: A good experimental study that has explanatory power would have to study randomly selected development projects. At some point, you'd look at each project and decide if it had good insight and a good team. After the project is judged a success or not, and after you've decided if it had a good team and insight or not, then you could try to use the results to explain what was happening, even if the sample turned out to be all not-good teams having not-good insight.

So a proper study on the effectiveness of early documentation should focus mostly on projects that were started by experienced and/or cohesive teams working towards a reasonably well understood goal. But how would one select those, the "1a" subgroup, from the entire 1a+1b? How could one tell which is which?

The only way that I could imagine is by reading the planning and process documents. Those are hard to come by for successful projects, because they are generally proprietary. For failed projects they (if any) are either going to be pieces of crap that are part of the failure, or after-the-fact memoranda that show why someone else was to blame for the failure.

Another after-the-fact document is the specification that gets written after product development is completed. A dev manager once candidly explained these to me: How could they possibly know what the specification of the final product is, unless the product is already finished? I think that if you boiled down all of the variations on this theme, you'd end up with the idea that they're working on an evolving prototype that will change (and probably a lot). I also suspect that this is another way of saying 'good team but no insight.'

Once in a while they might be gold that was set aside in a vain attempt to use the precious dross.

What have I come up with? Am I right

Indubitably.
---------

Ned Bedinger
doc -at- edwordsmith -dot- com

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Follow-Ups:

References:
Agile, SCRUM and Technical Writing: From: Gillespie, Terilyn
Re: Agile, SCRUM and Technical Writing: From: Gene Kim-Eng
Re: Agile, SCRUM and Technical Writing: From: Peter Neilson

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