RE: Do you log your changes?

Subject: RE: Do you log your changes?
From: "McLauchlan, Kevin" <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com>
To: Dan Goldstein <DGoldstein -at- riverainmedical -dot- com>, "techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:45:17 -0500



>Dan Goldstein
>
> The form used to review and approve document changes includes a log of
> changes. The level of detail in the log is my judgment call: Sometimes
> I'll just summarize the new or changed text, and other times I'll post
> it verbatim to the log. The form itself has evolved over
> time, based on
> feedback from my reviewers.
>
> This applies only to approved document releases. We don't
> have a log of
> incremental changes in the draft revisions between releases.


Hmm. Maybe I'm the only one who does this...

Obviously, when the new spec for a product revision comes down the
pipe, I make additions/changes/corrections in order to document the
changes to the product.

But...

Often it will happen that I land on a page/topic and read what's
there, and decide that it's not clear (as originally presented,
two years ago or whatever). Or, it's not as complete
as my current knowledge would have it. While fixing that, I naturally
see pointers to other topics... it's classic hypertexting... you
just go where the browsing takes you... ok, where it takes me...
and along the way I tweak and improve and sometimes even catch
outdated stuff that I can remove.

Maybe a bulleted list is easier to grasp when it's converted
into a table, or a diagram. Or maybe one of the SMEs has done
a nifty graphic in a presentation and I see exactly the spot
where I could use that graphic to good effect.

I don't normally keep track of such wandering, pot-luck "improvements".

But I realize that some people do. So I was curious about their
reasons and their methods. And whether tracking even your smallest
tweaks eats into your productive hours.


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Follow-Ups:

References:
Do you log your changes?: From: McLauchlan, Kevin
RE: Do you log your changes?: From: Dan Goldstein

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