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 [...]
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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.
