Writing the User Docs first?

[Gene Kim-Eng]

I've done it.  At one past client, the software requirement spec was a highly detailed description of how features were supposed to 
work, based on the Marketing experts' knowledge of how the prospective customers would expect them to work if the product being 
developed was going to be competitive with the current industry giant's.  I wrote the user doc based on that, the programmers coded 
based on it and the testers compared all three.

The development environment did not have a name, Agile or other, but I think the company did stumble upon some aspects of what is 
commonly known as "Agile."

Gene Kim-Eng


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gordon McLean" <Gordon.McLean at GrahamTechnology.com>
> Given that, in XP, there is a focus on little to no documentation during the
> design/build of the software, I've been pondering how the Publications team
> can fill that gap, namely by writing as complete a draft as early as
> possible and getting buy-in from the Dev team that they'll use the user docs
> whilst developing the software.
>
> Am I barking mad? Anyone working in XP (or any other Agile environment) care
> to chip in? Are our processes broken?