Re: Developments in the review cycle

[Ryan Young <ryangyoung -at- gmail -dot- com>]

We've started using pull requests in Git for our reviews (our source is
Markdown). Like Confluence, everyone can see each other's comments and you
can have a conversation thread. It works especially well for revisions
because you can see exactly what changed. It hasn't been that long, but
I've begun to prefer it to Confluence because it limits comments to the
review period. While the continuous feedback is nice, I find it difficult
to properly deal with many different disparate comments on a "finished" doc
while I'm working on the next thing.

We assign reviews in JIRA to keep track and try to break up the reviews in
small-ish chunks so as not to overload reviewers.

I greatly prefer this process to the old one where I'd send out a PDF to a
bunch of people, parse their comments (which were sometimes in the PDF,
sometimes not), update the source, send out another revision, and so on.


-----Original Message-----
> From: techwr-l-bounces+sh1448291904=gmail -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
> [mailto:techwr-l-bounces+sh1448291904=gmail -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com] On
> Behalf Of Erika Yanovich
> Sent: Wednesday, 6 April 2016 12:08
> To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
> Subject: Developments in the review cycle
>
> In the "good old days", tech writers followed the Outline-First
> draft-Second-draft-Camera ready model. We would submit an entire
> publication
> for review (perhaps with some minor TBDs inside) and the world was a
> simpler
> place.
>
> What I see nowadays is more dynamic: partial drafts (or bunch of topics)
> sent to different reviewers at different times. The stages are blurred and
> the follow-up more complicated.
>
> I know some of you don't believe in complete publications anymore, just in
> separate topics that get compiled daily (or whenever) into a larger entity,
> but publications are still alive and kicking out there.
>
> So my questions are:
> 1. Do you also see this transformation?
> 2. If yes, how do you cope with it?
> 3. Should we manage each chunk separately according to the old model
> (sounds
> a bit crazy) or replace the old model with a new one?
>
> Erika
>
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