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There was a discussion of agile documentation on the
extremeprogramming Yahoo!Group a few days ago, but it
seemed to focus on the documentation of code and not
on user documentation.
**************************
The site you sent was interesting Earl. My sense from reading about
various rapid development methods is that they are very
developer-centric--which makes sense. Most of them are created by
developers! It's sometimes hard to figure out where other parts of the
organization fit. I noticed that testing was not mentioned at all in the
essay on the above site, yet test organizations are usually a major
client of project documentation.
My role has almost always been to focus on end-user documentation during
a software development project, not to be documenting the project
itself, which seems to be mostly what the author was writing about. I
find it very easy to parallel the development of documentation with the
progress of the software. My sense is that it's much harder to be a
technical writer who has to document a project, even one that follows
the principles described in the article.
One interesting feature of XP is that you are always supposed to have a
functioning product. You define the minimum functioning unit and then
test/redefine/rebuild, etc. Because you always have a functioning
product (even if it's very bare-bones) you can get customer feedback
very quickly. I think end-user documentation can work much the same way,
and you can include it in the product cycle. Someone else will have to
speak to whether the same approach can be used for the other sorts of
documents.
I think there was also some discussion of this awhile ago on the list...
maybe I'll peruse the archives tomorrow.
Lisa
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