Shannon Greywalker's Blog

Confused about how Google is positioning Wave versus Buzz? Me too, until I found this excellent article: Google Buzz Versus Google Wave. Essentially, Wave is for collaboration, while Buzz is for conversation.

You’ve probably heard the opinion that distributed agile teams experience a significant “drag factor” due to the inability to communicate as efficiently as fully collocated teams that are sitting together in the same physical bullpen. However, empirical data from Microsoft shows that this sentiment is unfounded. I can back up Microsoft’s position with my own empirical observations, and I present a 9-minute screencast that demonstrates the “virtual bullpen” that my scrum team has used for the past nine months that enabled us to have zero “communication drag” regardless of where any member was working from on a given day.

In my post from last month about Why minimalist documentation is not always a good match for agile development, I explained the issues with using minimalism in an agile environment but was unable to offer any advice on how to effectively use a minimalist approach in an agile shop. I was still wrestling with that [...]

I’ve surprised several colleagues recently with my strong opinion that minimalist documentation is not a good match for some, perhaps many, Agile shops, and that instead a basic topic-oriented authoring approach is a better fit. In all cases, their response was essentially “But I thought that minimalism was recommended as the best approach for Agile?” I can understand this response, given that minimalism itself is not well understood within the technical writing community at large just yet. This article explains why minimalism is not a good fit for tech writers in some agile shops, and it also describes strategies and techniques for making minimalism work in an agile environment.

Just a few days ago, on Thursday, May 28 at the Day 2 keynote address of Google I/O in San Franciso, Google made history with their 90-minute Google Wave Developer Preview session. Here is a link to the video of that presentation, and in my opinion it will be among the most valuable 90 minutes [...]

Technical writers who are new to Scrum and agile development often wonder “how do you develop user documentation when you have no comprehensive release plans and design specs?” This post explains the concept of evolutionary documentation.

This post delves into the challenges of achieving all day real-time collaboration–a “virtual bullpen” among a geographically distributed Scrum team. A concrete example demonstrates why email and forums are not time-efficient enough to enable Scrum, and some promising tools are identified.