Gnaargh! Or, I Am Not Psychic

[James Barrow]

>Sarah Bouchier wrote:

>This will, I suspect, be a familiar rant to most of you.

Sarah, you may want to consider joining Ranters-l at lists.ranters-l.com
(joking).

>I've just discovered that, shortly after both I and the client went
>through and checked my company's user manual and online help against the
>product, the development team made some major changes to the UI without
>telling the doc team.

Welcome to my world.

>Normally I'd have picked this up through the paranoiac (though
>justified, I feel!) checking I do anytime I have a few minutes spare,
>but what with it being the last few days before the release deadline I
>was working ten hour lunchless days as it was, and I +really+ didn't
>have the spare time to go through the entire product to see if anything
>had changed.

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that they're not after you.

>Unfortunately, there's scarcely a process here, never mind one that
>includes the technical authors.  The closest thing is the bug tracking
>system, but apparently most of those changes didn't go through it (and
>even if they had, I've yet to train the developers to assign bugs to
>documentation after fixing).

Same here, although I did find - with a little snooping around - that I
could configure our issue tracking system to email me whenever (i) there's a
new issue where the 'issuer' selected the "Impacts Documentation" checkbox
and, (ii) emails me whenever anyone submits an issue marked "fix" or
"enhancement".  

>What is the best process you've ever worked with (or dreamed of) that
>enables technical authors to find out about changes/new projects etc
>before the very last minute is past?

The process that worked most often is to go to each developer/project
manager and make sure that you're on their mailing lists.  For example, my
current project team receives issues/bug fixes from testers in New York.
These testers send their issues/fixes to the Project Manager.  He then sends
an email to the entire team.  I just made sure that I was on the "entire
team" mailing list.

>The prize for the best answer is me doing my damnedest to implement it
>here :)

When you're at work go out on a ledge and threaten to jump if you are not
informed if any changes.  Please note, this will work much better if you are
*not* on the first floor.

- Jim