How time flies when you attend a conference, catch a flu, and then try to catch up with all the work stacked in between… such as blogging 
I do not have personal experience from working with agile SW. But fate has thrown some workshops and seminar presentations about it my way. And when you hear about something where the word combo “no UI specs” pops up sometimes, as a technical communicator, you are bound to get interested.
What kinds of things could agile mean to a technical communicator?
- You need to understand your company’s SW creation process better than you may have before. Written SW documentation may not be available in the accurate abundance
it used to be. You need to understand what and why they are doing in the SW team to get the most information out of it for your own work. In the best scenario in agile, you may need to participate as a team member in the SW team’s work. - You need to think outside the box and be innovative. The best documentation process for agile SW creation in your company may be very different from your current one. It just might be correct in your situation to do unconventional things like translate unfinished content that is still under development *gasp*. Don’t be afraid to go wild as you are planning the process and aligning it with your agile SW creation. You might be surprised at what works, or what is needed.
- You need to develop your communication skills. I kinda like Bogo Vatovec’s description of the solitary, introvert technical writer which he talked about in the Portland WritersUA conference – I am sort of that type myself. The further you are removed from the agile SW team, the more communication skills you may actually need, as you need to “extort” information from the team members outside their regular, typically face-to-face oral comms.
- You need to develop your inner sense of “good enough”. Even if you are a perfectionist who wants every comma and colon to be in their correct places, you may sometimes need to release very drafty documentation.
But this here is just my speculation. What has agile meant to you in practice?
Filed under: new concepts
I’ve blogged about this in some depth previously, working in an Agile environment means being able to LEARN and USE the application you are documenting.
http://www.onemanwrites.co.uk/2007/09/19/trickle-vs-traditional/
Thanks, Gordon. I fully agree with you that agile means getting involved and breaking out of the old habits. When the environment where we do our work changes, so should we.
I have a specific concern though about how agile works when the documentation people cannot physically be on the same location as the SW team. Nowadays, the company does not need to be even that big to have programmers in India or China. But the documentation team may be an established function sitting in Europe, NAM, or wherever your company’s from. I assume it can take a looot of extra effort to make agile work in a situation like that also for the documentation. (I hope the first option is not to fire the existing technical writers, or to ask them to move to China