Re: The Agile / Xtreme TW

[T S <tens00 -at- gmail -dot- com>]

Hello. I missed the beginning of this thread but I have been working in an
agile development environment for a while now to create user documentation
and online help. The success varies among project teams. Sometimes the
writing part still gets thrown at us at the end of the sprint because
development was using the time to work. However, my overall experience has
been that it works much better than the way we used to do things. And, even
though there can be a rewrites, I find that working in an agile environment
often gives me more insight to the product while we work through iterations.

I believe there was another mention about Scott Ambler and a presentation
maybe? If so, I'd love to hear more about that.

On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 9:28 PM, Peter Neilson <neilson -at- windstream -dot- net>wrote:

> My slight experience with agile-like development has suffered from some
> of the usual diseases that keep the writer out of the loop.
>
> I've even seen where the writer had been access to the source code, and
> couldn't quite get the hang of it, but later discovered that what he was
> seeing (unlike what the developers saw) was stuff from the previous
> iteration of the code, before it went agile-like. On some projects (way
> before Agile) I was on a writing team that practised creative paranoia.
> "Why haven't we heard from Development Team X in three weeks? I bet they
> have a secret project!" (Sure enough, they do, and they are unaware
> it'll need end-user docs.) But that was in a Previous Millennium; with
> the passage of time we have become more modern, and now everything is
> perfect.
>
>
> Michael West wrote:
> > You need to be aware of the distinction between end-user training and
> > documentation (including online help), on the one hand, and technical
> > documentation (including detailed specifications, mainly) on the other.
> It
> > is the latter that Agile practitioners, in general, see as a time-waster.
> >
> > I've corresponded with Scott Ambler on this issue, and he has emphasized
> > that requirements for end-user training and documentation should be
> treated
> > as "user stories". He also emphasized that when he says "no more
> > documentation than absolutely necessary", it is the USER who specifies
> how
> > much is necessary, and it is extremely important that this requirement be
> > handled in a disciplined way.
> >
> > Not all Agile-based development handbooks make the distinction
> sufficiently
> > clear, and it is unfortunate that there was no "User Experience" advocate
> on
> > the original Agile team.
> >
> > On the plus side, I work in an Agile development environment, and I have
> > found that having the user training and documentation "stories" up on the
> > board for the whole development team to see every day helps get these
> tasks
> > the priority and "respect" among code developers they seldom had in the
> bad
> > old days of "waterfall" project mismanagement.
> >
>
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
> ComponentOne Doc-To-Help 2009 is your all-in-one authoring and publishing
> solution. Author in Doc-To-Help's XML-based editor,  Microsoft Word or
> HTML and publish to the Web, Help systems or printed manuals.
> http://www.doctohelp.com
>
> Help & Manual 5: The complete help authoring tool for individual
> authors and teams. Professional power, intuitive interface. Write
> once, publish to 8 formats. Multi-user authoring and version control!
> http://www.helpandmanual.com/
>
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-- 
Tara
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

ComponentOne Doc-To-Help 2009 is your all-in-one authoring and publishing 
solution. Author in Doc-To-Help's XML-based editor,  Microsoft Word or 
HTML and publish to the Web, Help systems or printed manuals. 
http://www.doctohelp.com

Help & Manual 5: The complete help authoring tool for individual
authors and teams. Professional power, intuitive interface. Write
once, publish to 8 formats. Multi-user authoring and version control! http://www.helpandmanual.com/

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