Re: Click X, or click the X button?

[Marguerite Krupp <mkrupp128 -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

You mean they give you a whole THREE WEEKS!!! <G>

I'm still digging into this Agile stuff, but I fould a lot of articles by googling "agile documentation," including the stuff about user stories. The Agile Manifesto is worth reading, along with the Twelve Tenets. 

That said, it's too general to be useful to us.

One of the key things is that everyone has to talk with each other every day in a stand-up meeting, so you have some hint of what's going on. My limited experience has been with a distributed work team, and the daily interactions have, indeed, helped, although usually they're at a very low level of detail. At least I know what's happening and can follow up, as needed, outside that meeting. We don't yet observe the Agile methodology religiously, though I can see what's coming.

Jean-Luc Mazet has done some excellent presentations at recent STC Annual Conferences about Agile docs. They should be available on the STC site or by googling his name. The November STC-Boston Chapter meeting (November 18, should anyone be in the neighborhood) is doing a panel on Agile docs. I'm sure there are many resources out there, as well as horror/success stories, but as I said, I'm just getting started with my research. Agile and modular docs seem made for each other...another whole can of worms, I know. Let's not go there right now.

More later; film at 11:00.

Marguerite
--- On Wed, 10/28/09, Peter Neilson <neilson -at- windstream -dot- net> wrote:

> From: Peter Neilson <neilson -at- windstream -dot- net>
> Subject: Re: Click X, or click the X button?
> To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
> Date: Wednesday, October 28, 2009, 10:04 AM
> Marguerite Krupp wrote:
> > I've been researching Agile documentation, and one of
> the tenets is that ...
> [good stuff snipped]
> 
> The management take I've often seen on Agile is that doc
> can be 
> postponed even later in the dev cycle because there is no
> plan. Your 
> research is encouraging, because it seems to suggest using
> Agile itself 
> to counter decades of difficult standard practises:
> 
> - "Don't let the writers or developers talk to the
> customers. They'll 
> promise the moon, give away the store."
> - "Don't waste money documenting before the project is
> finished."
> - "Where did you get this crap? It's not from the latest
> design spec for 
> the UI. We gave it to you a month ago. Oh, wait a minute,
> Tech Pubs 
> isn't on the dev list."
> - "Get the docs done in three weeks; it's almost FCS!"
> 
> I'd like to see some pointers to appropriate Agile stuff,
> and perhaps to 
> entities that actually are using Agile effectively.
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^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Free Software Documentation Project Web Cast: Covers developing Table of
Contents, Context IDs, and Index, as well as Doc-To-Help  
2009 tips, tricks, and best practices.
http://www.doctohelp.com/SuperPages/Webcasts/

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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