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I use flow charts to document the process for development of end-user
docs. But our engineers are responsible for creating flow charts of the
program. In the past, we had an engineer who tried to pass this off to me
(the tech writer), and we ended up wasting a lot of time because he kept
missing important steps in his program design.
In my opinion, the engineer should use flow charts to plan the
program, and the tech writer should use flow charts to plan the
documentation. Of course, if the tech writer is developing documentation
for the engineer, then the boundaries get murky.
Hope this helps.
Kathryn J Acciari
Technical Writer/Communicator
Buffalo, New York
acciari -at- acsu -dot- buffalo -dot- edu
On Tue, 3 Feb 1998, Anthony Markatos wrote:
>snip<
> Do software technical writers often have to flow chart the system they
> are creating documentation on? I would ordinarily assume that any flow
> chart (i.e., logical flow chart, data flow diagram, etc.) would be
> created by developers and systems analysts and then given to the
> technical writer. However, I have always had to create these myself.
> Existing flow charts were either non-existent or unusable.
>
>
>
