In my professional engagements, I’m a huge evangelist for minimalism in technical communication. So much so, that I’ve spent the past 7 months codifying the first publicly available, detailed methodology for authoring in a pure minimalist style. I’ll be officially rolling out this guide (for free to all) in another month. It’s been mostly finished [...]
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.
