Comments on: No Docs = No Product

By: one man writes » Web apps are not products

one man writes » Web apps are not products — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 16:20:03 +0000

[...] Let me repeat what I said previously: [...]

By: Sarah

Sarah — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 23:43:00 +0000

Completely agree that no docs = no product. In fact, technical writers are the caretakers of life, the universe, and everything ;)

I’m lucky enough to be working for a company which totally gets documentation. But I have had less fortunate experiences in the past.

And currently, I’m in a very *agile* environment. It’s a lot of fun, and very rewarding. We’re a team of tech writers, and we’re continually on the move and adapting the way we work as well as the docs themselves, to suit the agile environment.

Synchronicity rocks. Often the tech writers and the engineers find themselves working on the same aspect of the product, even when that’s *not* planned.

Seeya on the page :)

By: Gordon McLean

Gordon McLean — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 08:47:17 +0000

Where I am at present, the technical writers are well integrated into the development teams and we manage to produce some pretty good documentation by staggering (trickling as I call it) the information in throughout the dev cycle.

I think XP has a place, but I think there needs to be some additional thought on the information debt being built-up by software companies that don’t agree with the title of this post.

Thankfully I’m not working at such place, nor have I!

By: Kat

Kat — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 07:56:47 +0000

Some people believe that XP is the Emperor’s New Clothes of software development, and one of its shortcomings is that it by definition undermines the role of documentation.

Management like it coz it’s cheap and they don’t want to spend money on a QS, and developers don’t like writing. Matt Stephen’s discusses docs in his XP critique:

“XP makes a big issue about its core value of Communication. This is wonderful, as communication is definitely a key factor to the success of any project, XP or otherwise.

Unfortunately, XP also makes a big issue about not doing any documentation (or at least very little, or none at all). I think this is partly why XP has such a broad appeal amongst earnest young programmers. After all, documentation really sucks, right? Just like homework always sucked.”

You can read his full review at:
http://www.softwarereality.com/lifecycle/xp/case_against_xp.jsp