Why should technical writers be included in the development lifecycle? Is the company concerned about missed deadlines, buggy code, and unhappy users?
This may seem to counter previous experience, but an agile approach to documentation can address all these problems. This can only happen if the whole team is on board.
Documentation under a waterfall technique gives the team little reason to care about capturing important information about a feature. It seems in the industry that documentation is handled during a final phase after a defined development process.
This approach honestly doesn't work with agile. Many times in an Agile development process, story demos, and feature testing interject changes at a last-minute. Because the Agile …show more content…
Trying to obtain information on a project they are no longer involved causes interruptions that are not desired in agile. Pulling a developer from a new project disrupts the schedule and is inefficient.
Including a Technical Writer in the agile process:
1. Agile can involve the writers in the project from the start, in a process known as continuous documentation. For ibml products where most of the material must be written from scratch, continuous documentation ensures that the large volume of documentation gets written, reviewed, and delivered on time.
2. Documenting in parallel with the development cycle makes it easier for developers to answer questions. They are still involved in development, so they can explain their work without having to go back and recall what is past work/code to them.
3. Getting technical writers involved early is a great way to get feedback on your design and the user interface. If your documentation team can't figure out a feature or the interface, your customers probably won't either. The technical writers' audience is the client/user; UI help naturally comes from a technical writer. Also, having the technical writers involved during the cycle also helps QA discover problems. Technical Writers may also leverage QA test plans making the whole process more
This may seem to counter previous experience, but an agile approach to documentation can address all these problems. This can only happen if the whole team is on board.
Documentation under a waterfall technique gives the team little reason to care about capturing important information about a feature. It seems in the industry that documentation is handled during a final phase after a defined development process.
This approach honestly doesn't work with agile. Many times in an Agile development process, story demos, and feature testing interject changes at a last-minute. Because the Agile …show more content…
Trying to obtain information on a project they are no longer involved causes interruptions that are not desired in agile. Pulling a developer from a new project disrupts the schedule and is inefficient.
Including a Technical Writer in the agile process:
1. Agile can involve the writers in the project from the start, in a process known as continuous documentation. For ibml products where most of the material must be written from scratch, continuous documentation ensures that the large volume of documentation gets written, reviewed, and delivered on time.
2. Documenting in parallel with the development cycle makes it easier for developers to answer questions. They are still involved in development, so they can explain their work without having to go back and recall what is past work/code to them.
3. Getting technical writers involved early is a great way to get feedback on your design and the user interface. If your documentation team can't figure out a feature or the interface, your customers probably won't either. The technical writers' audience is the client/user; UI help naturally comes from a technical writer. Also, having the technical writers involved during the cycle also helps QA discover problems. Technical Writers may also leverage QA test plans making the whole process more