Re: Happy to be a Tech Writer?

["Mike Starr" <mikestarr-techwr-l -at- writestarr -dot- com>]

Oddly enough, I edit my own work, too. Would I prefer to have an editor to
review my work? You bet. However, it's just me and three programmers. That's
the whole company. I'm going to be seeing if I can figure out a way to have
someone else qualified review what I'm doing but if it comes down to paying
someone to do so, I suspect the answer will be no.

As far as there not being any QA or formal testing here and other places
I've worked, the philosophy seems to be that it'd be nice to have but there
isn't a budget for it. In some ways, that's an unspecified part of my job.
I'm the bug magnet.

In defense of that approach (both for documentation and programming), I
might say that even in cases where there's a full team of professional
reviewers and/or testers, the outcome doesn't seem (to me) to vary a whole 
helluva lot.

Look at the support forums for Microsoft, Adobe, Macromedia, etc. Now those 
organizations have extensive QA and testing teams, yet the number of bugs 
reported for their products is still appalling.

Mike
--
Mike Starr                            WriteStarr Information Services
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----- Original Message -----
From: "Condo, Candis" <ccondo -at- c-cor -dot- com>
To: "Mike Starr" <mikestarr-techwr-l -at- writestarr -dot- com>;
<techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2007 11:52 AM
Subject: RE: Happy to be a Tech Writer?

Whoa. How does that work? Isn't that like us editing our own work? How
many of us would be surprised to miss errors in our work. While we
seldom have the "luxury" of an editor, most engineering groups I have
worked with have at least one QA engineer whose sole responsibility is
to qa the product. I am even concerned when QA reports into engineering.
Conflict of interest and I am not talking about a large or even medium
size company here. Sure, a start up won't have QA (maybe) but . ..

Candis Condo

-----Original Message-----
From: techwr-l-bounces+ccondo=c-cor -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
[mailto:techwr-l-bounces+ccondo=c-cor -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com] On Behalf
Of Mike Starr
Sent: Wednesday, April 04, 2007 9:27 PM
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: Re: Happy to be a Tech Writer?

Exactly... most of the shops I've been in haven't had even an informal
test
and QA process. The developers code it, do their own testing and ship
it.

Mike 

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