As I write this, I’m sitting at the Dallas airport, suffering through a 3 hour delay on my flight to Washington D.C. to present at our 2nd Agile in Action Roadshow with our friends from Electric Cloud, Perforce, and VersionOne. As I have the time, I’ve been reflecting on my time here in Dallas, and the phrase “Everything is big in Texas” is bang on. Before I get to that though, I have to say that I do love Dallas…I’m not totally sure, but I truly believe I’m treated a little more special because of
Read More »
At the risk of sounding like a co-dependent, in this post I discuss coping mechanisms that a “big picture” technical writer (say, like my friend Beulah) can use to adjust to working in the granular conditions of an agile environment. Don’t give up the big picture When you work on a bunch of stories or tasks, it’s trees, trees, trees everywhere you look and not a forest to be found. This means that a nice concise how-to could be a long way off while you document myriad features. My advice is to finish
Read More »
So awhile back, I was begging for some good statistics on Agile adoption, since at that time, there really wasn’t anything substantial to sink your teeth into. Well, a new report from Forrester came across my desk, and it helped to strengthen what most people believe…that Agile processes have overtaken Waterfall as the development methodology of choice. In this report, which cites information gathered from a Q3 2009 survey of IT professionals, it states that 35% of respondents said that Agile most closely reflected their development process, while waterfall processes came in at 13%.
Read More »
As a manager of a small tech writing team in an agile environment (are there any large tech writing teams left out there?), it’s easy to lose myself in how-the-heck-can-we-keep-up-with-myriad-coders-frantically-coding thinking. So when my manager scheduled a meeting to ask what innovations my team has planned for the next release or two, I thought of a few choice responses, such as “Um… how about documenting the new features in time for release? Is that innovative enough for ya?” and “Innovate THIS.” Eventually I calmed down, since he’s the boss, and I have a mortgage.
Read More »
The last entry in my Going Agile series will look at the retrospective meeting. The retrospective meeting is held at the end of every sprint/iteration, and it is the time to discuss what went well, and what could be improved in the next sprints. Some people will say the Product Owner should be in attendance, and some believe the PO should not. IMHO, the PO is a part of the team, and should be there…and in our case, I was. We weren’t sure how to solicit input from the team, so we decided that everyone
Read More »
I’m a technical writer who’s a big picture kind of person and that means agile development is sheer torture for me. Going into my second agile project, I thought I would be able to go with the “flow” a bit more. I was wrong. But, it’s important to point out that our documentation team hit all of our deadlines for new features, while substantially rewriting our help set and moving it to a wiki. I’m pleased with the outcome, but the trip was not pleasant. This will be my first post in a series about
Read More »
I just couldn’t resist using the classic spaghetti Western as the title for this installment of my Going Agile series because it a) it was an awesome movie, and b) it truly sums up that 1st iteration of ours. My last post was all about the 1st iteration planning meeting, and how it was such an exciting and productive time for our team. We came out of that meeting a little weary, but extremely motivated to get to work. We were also just a tad naive. The next 2 weeks were a roller coaster as
Read More »
Now that the New Year is upon us, I thought it would be a good time to add another chapter to my Going Agile series. My last entry left off at the point where we had prepared our backlog, created team rules and defined “Done”. Now we were ready for our first Iteration Planning meeting. In our “team room” we had all the essentials in place for this meeting: stacks of color-coded cards (for capturing the various to do’s, or tasks), pens and highlighters, our Scrum board (with pins) to stick our tasks onto, and
Read More »
Thought I would take a moment to share with you my experience at this year’s IP ESC show in Grenoble, France. First off, Grenoble is beautiful sitting at the foot of the French Alps. If you get the chance, go! Back to the show. This is typically the IP Show, but this year is the first that ESC has been added to the agenda. I don’t think it helped attendance-wise. From what I can tell, there are maybe 200-250 attendees in total. I spent the last couple of days sharing booth duty with our friends
Read More »
I remember that idyllic summer day when I saw my very agile dog Maggie jumping through the sprinkler. I laughed until I cried. And then I thought: This reminds me of what I do for a living. I’m a technical writer and technical writing in an Agile environment is somewhat like chasing those water drops. You can run after those features, but early in the game there’s not really anything to hold onto. So, how does one document a feature that will probably change from one iteration (or day) to another without chasing one’s tail
Read More »
