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RE: How many product releases do you support in a given year?
Subject:RE: How many product releases do you support in a given year? From:"Lippincott, Richard" <RLippincott -at- as-e -dot- com> To:Julie Stickler <jstickler -at- gmail -dot- com>, Technical Writing <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Tue, 18 Mar 2014 21:25:01 +0000
Between software releases, product configuration changes, and localization releases, I've been doing a dozen or more a year for the past couple of years. (Will be a little less going forward now that we have a second tech writer.)
We've got three major product divisions, each of which has significant variations in the hardware, potentially a couple of dozen different major variations. It's not unusual for about half of them to require new documentation in any given year.
On the bright side, I'm rarely bored at work.
Rick Lippincott, Technical Writer
American Science and Engineering, Inc. | www.as-e.com
829 Middlesex Turnpike | Billerica, MA 01821 USA | Fax +1-978-262-8702
Office +1-978-262-8807 | rlippincott -at- as-e -dot- com
-----Original Message-----
From: techwr-l-bounces+rlippincott=as-e -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com [mailto:techwr-l-bounces+rlippincott=as-e -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com] On Behalf Of Julie Stickler
Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2014 2:56 PM
To: Technical Writing
Subject: How many product releases do you support in a given year?
So, I'm writing up notes for my annual evaluation and it occurs to me that in the past year I've supported an almost ridiculous number of product releases.
Back when I was doing waterfall software development, I might have a product release once a quarter, with only one really being a major feature release and the rest being smaller releases that were generally patches/bug fixes.
Now that I'm doing Agile (and supporting multiple products) it seems like every time I turn around I have another release deadline.
So my question for you folks today is, how many product releases a year are you expected to provide documentation for?
--
Julie Stickler http://heratech.wordpress.com/
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