Her development team did not like working with her because, they said, “…the content she delivered was always wrong.”

First, she got mad and tried to explain that she was working without a thorough understanding of the product’s benefits, and in many cases, working without access to the product (!). She was developing procedures based off requirements documents created for various gate reviews and her only means of communication with her team was email. No one told her things had changed since those documents were written, even though she sent her work out for review. Instead, they pushed her out of the loop and just wrote their own content.

True story.

January, the time of year when everything is new again, marks a number of organizational changes. New job roles, a new technical information process that had to fit into a new agile software development process, new team members, new bosses, everything’s new, NEW, NEW! For some people, this much change produces anxiety, but I am embracing them like another New Year’s Eve party.

As of a few days ago, I am now an Information Engineer. While I’m sad to see Technical Writer go the way of the dinosaur, I love the new moniker because it better explains how my role has changed I’ve kept up with the changes in this field.

This is a key point: I don’t think we can afford to wait for others to hold our hands and tug us to the next level. We must drive Technical Communication beyond the confines of the user manual. This means taking responsibility for learning new tools, following technology trends, taking risks.

When I first began working in this field, I remember hating to ask questions, afraid the perception I was creating was one of someone who didn’t know her job. Today, I consider this the number one tip on a What Not To Do list. I now ask questions constantly – it’s how how I learn. The answers to the questions I ask frequently take my thought processes into new directions – directions I would not have taken on my own. Asking questions is THE most important thing I do each day.

This is handy because one of the changes my employer is making is an ambitious initiative to completely transform technical information. We’re not writing manuals anymore. Instead, we’re writing very specific and focused scenarios – think articles - that include just enough information for users to solve a particular problem. Articles align with an Agile project’s user stories and can be ported into any number of information sets including books, Wikis, Help Systems, etc.

Sounds easy, right?

That’s what I thought.

In practice, identifying the content to include in an article has proven extremely frustrating for a number of reasons:

• My brain is stuck in book-mode. I figure it’s going to take my brain a while to stop thinking linearly. I must consciously think of what information a user needs to solve the problem at hand and no more.
• Agile user stories don’t neatly align to my work. This, I believe, is a growing pain. Frequently, the user stories the development team writes are way too granular for my work and are better suited as steps in a procedure, which in turn, may be part of my ‘article’.  I then thought I should try to map all the Agile user stories to the appropriate tech info article, but found many of them have no technical information impact. For example, back-end coding requires tracking so a developer creates a user story for it, but there is no corresponding UI function. It’s entirely code-based and automatic. I now focus on only the user stories with a UI function.
• My work crosses over sprints. I planned to document the user stories in lock step with the code developed in any given sprint. This has been working well for developing outlines but not for review-ready drafts. Again, I suspect this is a growing pain that will resolve itself as the development team gains expertise using Agile methodologies. So, for Feature X, I may be able to document only Adding X in Sprint 1, Deleting X in Sprint 2, and Modifying X in Sprint 3. This is perfectly fine, but it taxes a brain (see bullet 1) still stuck in Book Mode that wants to document the entire feature.

All these frustrations had me convinced I’d be hearing a sequel to the sad story I shared above. Instead, something cool has come out of it. During a conference call with my product manager this morning, we were exploring a new software tool the team is adopting for Agile tracking purposes. The tool was slow, subject to frequent hanging and eventually crashed. To fill the wait times, he brought up some concerns with various technologies and how they could impact our development efforts. To my astonishment and his, I not only knew his concerns, I understood and could contribute to the discussion.

This is a significant achievement – we’re only a few months into this project. For me to have this level of depth so early into the process is nothing short of miraculous. He pointed out that the team is now ASKING me questions instead of simply copying me on emails.

And this is only the beginning. I’m excited to see how an entire project developed and delivered using our new processes will be received by our customers.

What changes are you facing this year? Do they excite or terrify you? 

If you read the June post, you’ll remember I was perplexed by the idea. I wasn’t sure how Scenario-Based Content was any different from the task-based content we were already developing.

In the time since June, we’ve had some training and opportunity to practice during a certification process, which I just completed today. My impression? Scenario-Based Content just may be the answer to several questions.

How are Scenarios Different from Tasks?

Scenarios should align with user stories. For example, “I want to recover my protected server from a disaster even though I don’t have the disaster recovery option.”

This user story was my certification project. The solution to recovering this server is not a single task. Rather, it is about ten tasks, about half of which are optional, depending on outcomes of prior tasks, as well as on the specific configuration of the environment where the disaster occurred. All of these tasks were already written and included in our product’s Admin Guide. But we never addressed how users might actually read those tasks or we’d have know how difficult they were to follow.

I took apart the monster section and organized it into baby tasks. My first requirement for certification was to design a flow chart that explains the scenario. This, as it turns out, was crucial for my own understanding of the process.

The process, as originally written, had so many conditions, I kept losing my place. Distilling it down to something that could be expressed by a standard diamond decision shape required nesting conditions, which in turn, showed me where to break out the various optional procedures.

Armed with a list of baby procedures, it occurred to me that I needed a mechanism for guiding readers back to the main path through the flow chart. I added a What Should I Do Next section to every task in the scenario.

Can Scenario Documentation Truly Fit Inside an Agile Cycle? 

I was skeptical about this until I tried it for myself. At the same time I was practicing for my certification, I was also assigned to a new product team. This new product has several sprints already scheduled. I read the user stories planned for each sprint and began setting up scenario content shells ( I don’t have a working UI yet). Right now, I have three major scenario shells, which I may further break down, once I see how complex the UI is that supports them.

What astonished me was how much of this new product I already understand and it was just kicked off. With our old process, I wouldn’t have reached this point until several months into the year-long production cycle.

Will Scenarios Document the Whole System?

In a comment left after my June post, “Techquestioner” said scenarios may not show you the whole system. I think this is true to a large extent but hasten to add I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.

Here’s why:

The Admin Guide for one of my products is nearly a thousand pages. How frequently do technical communicators lament the fact that no one is reading our work? This is due primarily to our insistence that every detail be covered. The problem with that approach is most people will never have need for all of those details. For example, my product works on all Windows operating systems dating back to XP. But if some users are running Windows 7, they have no need for all the XP details.

Sure, we could debate publishing baby books for each OS version over the merits of single-sourcing, but the point remains the same – we’re giving them too much information.

Scenario-Based Documentation focuses ONLY on the information needed to solve the problem described in a very specific user story. If there are twenty fields on a UI dialog, but only three of them are needed in a particular scenario, then only those three are documented. The balance will be documented in some other scenario until, eventually, all fields are documented.

Aren’t We Doing Double Work? 

Got me there. Here’s one problem with Scenario-Based Content: Help Systems are still UI-centric. If I click a Help button on a screen, it means I need help on that screen. I don’t want to have to click through a dozen scenarios until I find the one that contains the instructions for completing the one field I need.

So I still see us documenting software screens separately for Context-Sensitive Help systems in addition to Scenario-Based Content development.

Based on what I’ve practiced and applied so far, I like the Scenario-Based Content approach.

How are you documenting software in Agile environments? How are you addressing the problem of fitting UI-centric Help screens into a scenario-based model of development? 

That’s the theory, at least.

My introduction to this new process left me scratching my head. How is scenario-based content different from what we’re already doing?  We’re writing tasks, not concepts, so I had difficulty imagining how I’d apply the new initiative to my work. We had several more presentations and finally, I spoke directly to a writer on a different product who’d already begun using the process.

But it wasn’t until Tom Johnson posted this essay on the failures of topic-based authoring that it all made more sense. As Tom notes:

“The problem with topic-based authoring is that many times, these tasks don’t mean a whole lot in isolation.”

That statement reminded me of my experiences teaching SAP a few years back. When we pilot-tested a course I’d written to teach users how to create product codes in the new system, we discovered all the course did was present a series of isolated tasks, one after the other, with no backbone to tie them all together. Because the SAP system was quite different from the legacy system it replaced, the new tasks did not align perfectly with old ones, so even users’ domain knowledge did not help them. We ended the pilot early and redesigned the course with the end-to-end scenario superstructure Tom describes.

I sat with the students themselves as well as the SAP development team and produced job aids, process flow charts, and various cheat sheets that were essentially a bread-crumb trail through various use cases. For example, the use case for Create a Sellable Product Code is NOT identical to Create a Component Code. Creating a sellable product code required users to perform at least five different SAP tasks, including creating component codes. Worse, those tasks had to be performed in reverse order when compared to the legacy system. The end result was a well-trained user group able to successfully create product codes.

If you’re wondering why I did not design the course this way from the beginning, you’re not alone. The answer? We thought we’d covered that during design. The SAP implementation team consisted of actual business users, yet even they did not consider tying together the tasks required to achieve some goal. Every one believed it would be obvious to users when just the opposite turned out to be true.

This is a problem quite typical on project teams where schedules are aggressive and access to the right experts is scarce. As we adopt our new scenario-based content strategy, I’m concerned the same fate will afflict our documentation.  We don’t always have access to real users and must rely on internal experts from Support, Development and Education.

I’m still not sure how to actually apply our new content strategy but I do think it has the potential for making our information truly usable. What do you think about scenario-based documentation?

Scott promises to address the skills we’ll all need to succeed in a Help 2.0 socially enabled world in a later issue of Intercom. But I wonder if we can give him some first-hand accounts now – what are YOU doing to stay on top of this emerging trend? Do you agree with us – is a socially enabled Help site the future of tech comm? How do you change the minds of those who (still) think PDFs are just fine?

As cool as this is, there are also some drawbacks to it, tops on the list being I DO HAVE OTHER WORK TO DO!  Video production has a tendency to suffer Scope Creep, so here are some tips on managing this effort in case you find yourself in my predicament.

Invite Murphy

Don’t even try to prevent things from going wrong; they will.  It’s a given. The best prevention is to have contingencies in place.  We’re using Adobe Captivate to produce our videos, but not all writers have a license and running it from a server is prohibited by the license terms.  So, we installed it on a lab machine we can all use. Sort of like a kiosk. This is the backup plan in case the version I have on my laptop fails. I also have a backup mic in case the primary mic fails.

Set up the Environment

Documenting software without a functional version to play with is challenging, certainly not a best practice, but nevertheless, doable. But producing videos without a functional version is just not possible.  For this reason, I defer video production to as late in the development cycle as possible – usually, right before beta begins. Of course, waiting this long risks meeting the project schedule, so you’ll have to weigh those risks over the potential benefits, such as recording from a stable and (hopefully) bug-free software build.

You should also have a thorough understanding of the task you plan to record. I’m doing product videos for all of my team’s products, even those I’m not documenting. Because I’m unfamiliar with the interface and the design intention, I frequently cannot perform a task without expert guidance.  When you plan a video production project, remember to plan for some practice time. Familiarize yourself with all the menu selections and values that should be entered in selected fields so that you can perform the entire task without error at recording time.

Measure Twice, Cut Once

I like to work with a script for this reason. If I am not the technical writer assigned to the product I must video, my first step is to study the tech writer’s content. Much like peer editing, I often discover ambiguity in procedures as written by lending fresh eyeballs. I use the written procedure to develop a script. My scripts are Word tables with two columns: one for a description of the on-screen action including what screen should be displayed, what menu to select, what values to enter.  In the second column, I add the voiceover I plan to record on that screen.

I route all video scripts for review and approval within the product team. Members help me use the best terms (“Use ‘recover’ not ‘restore’), identify inaccuracies, offer suggestions for the features they want me to emphasize.  Script approval before the work begins is a critical time-saver. Once a video has been recorded and sync’d, changing problems after-the-fact requires an almost total re-do.

A Lot of Cooks in the Kitchen

As our video demos gained traction, they’ve evolved according to various corporate directives. For example, my first attempts merely had our company logo. Today, the Marketing team asks that I use a specific PowerPoint template for branding purposes, and a Flash fanfare opening sequence. There are also copyright and legal disclaimers I must use.

The Localization team is busy working on a way to streamline the translation process without having to completely record a video in each language. Depending on the size of your company, there may be additional teams with a stake in each video, i.e., Education, Pre-Sales, etc.  Track each requirement carefully and be sure to estimate it in future project plans.

Ask for Help

This aligns with that pest, Murphy, and his annoying tendency to foul things up. Since we’re deferring video production to as late in the development cycle as possible, time is naturally not to be wasted. Yet, like most people, I typically have more than one task on my daily To-Do list and those things cannot always wait until a video is done.  It’s okay to ask for help. During my latest video production efforts, I had a product with no name, an unstable build, a laptop that went on strike, a personal situation that required three days off and an injury that caused some discomfort to contend with.

While my laptop was being repaired, I worked on the kiosk. I revised the script so that the product is named as infrequently as possible, used photo-editing software to change the screens where instability was visible and took frequent breaks to help manage my pain. My colleagues helped record software tasks and prepared one of my other projects for a localization turnover while I locked myself in an empty office to record the voiceover. I could not have succeeded without the assist.

Give Them Food or Teach Them to Fish

Finally, I suggest documenting your own procedures as you fine-tune them and then holding impromptu training sessions with your colleagues. I did just this last month, so when I asked my coworkers to record tasks using Captivate, they were capable of doing so with minimal guidance from me. Not everyone is comfortable recording narration, though. Honestly, I’m STILL not comfortable with it myself.

That’s pretty much it. As writers emerge from their comfort zones and begin learning multimedia technologies like screen capture and video production, this will become as easy as typing. Tell me, are you incorporating new media into your documentation projects? I’d like to hear about it.

This got me thinking.

At first, I skimmed the posts, believing that we’re already addressing this by organizing content according to audience roles – for example, offering an Administrator’s Guide in addition to an End User’s Guide, because the two roles use the software differently.  But as I read more deeply – and this is a point I will revisit later – I realized that “use” of content shouldn’t be confined to job role. Within and across job roles, users read for different purposes – Doing, Learning, or Learning to Do. (Read the posts for more information on these concepts, as well as their sources.)

This reminded me of my first job back in my early twenties. Between 1987 and 1993, I was a secretary at a large commerical bakery whose products are sold in grocery stores. Managing the bakery’s large fleet of delivery trucks required access to data like mileage, fuel consumption, maintenance history, parts usage, and accident reports. The fleet was geographically distributed over most of the northeast so collecting and analyzing all of this data would have taken weeks if we hadn’t been able to computerize it.

Back then, we didn’t have Windows or email. There wasn’t even an Internet yet, not as we know it. We used a network of PCs running an operating system you probably never heard of: B.O.S.  Business Operating Systems. It was ugly; no fancy GUI screens, just old fashioned Green Screen. Everything was command-driven. All these years later, all I remember is the $ prompt. $A, $F, $S. I had a list of these $ commands typed in a single skinny column taped to my monitor.

My first Quick Reference Guide. (grin)

As I noted in my comment on Tom’s blog, I was asked to produce a monthly report from this system. There was a report generator called Auto Clerk that could produce reports from the database. I was handed an Auto Clerk guide, a Command Reference Guide, and a third guide whose name I can no longer remember that was mostly concepts and explanations.

I had a goal in mind – produce a report. That’s all I knew.  In other words, I did not know what I did not know to achieve my goal. The index and table of contents contained technical terms so I could not look up anything unless I first “spoke the language.”

That must be what the unnamed third guide was for. I read it cover to cover. I learned how long BOS existed, how it worked, what technologies it was based on. I finally found a very high-level description of the report generation process. That sent me to the Auto Clerk guide.

Again, I had to read the entire book cover to cover simply to learn what the right terms were in order to achieve my goal. What $ command instructs the system to first query the database and then display or print the results of my report design.

Wait. What report design?

Okay. Back to formula. I then focused on finding the commands to design a report. First, column layout, then the fields in the database whose values would provide the rows of the report.

That brought me to the last book, the micro-COBOL command reference guide where I had to find the commands and the syntax that would produce the output I wanted.

This took me almost two months to do. Granted, that was in addition to my usual responsibilities but still, two months of research? After two minutes of clicking links, I am now frustrated.

When I finally got a report out of that system, I typed up the entire procedure in my own words. I didn’t know it then, but that was my first piece of true technical communication.

What have I learned from this?

• BOS assumed I was reading to learn. I was not. I was reading to do.
• BOS presumed I already possessed a certain level of technical proficiency. I didn’t. I hadn’t yet finished my college degrees. However, I can tell you this – producing the report did NOT require all that domain knowledge.
• The Table of Contents and Index were not designed to help me find information; they were designed to browse for information. In other words, you must already know what you’re looking for.
• The guides were missing any real, specific examples, expressed as a typical user need. I had to cobble together syntax examples provided at the bottom of each command description in order to string together the combination of results I needed. The challenge with this is the technical writers used < > to denote user-specified values. I had a devil of a time determining when to omit those brackets in my own commands and when they were required.

How Would I Have Done This Today?

So much has changed since my days dealing with BOS. I would speak English instead of COBOL or whatever geek-speak a subject requires. For example, instead of writing a heading like “$F Command – Report Generation”  – a heading that told me nothing about its contents, I would have written, “Design Your Report’s Layout”, “Specify the Data to Use in Your Report” and “Display or Print Your Report.”

Adobe similarly frustrated me with headings like “Use the Dodge/Burn Tool.”  That would be great if I already knew what dodge and burn mean.

In the Index, I would enter such a topic in English, for those who don’t yet have the domain knowledge, and in geek-speak, for those who know what they’re looking for.

I’d make use of hyper-text technology and demote all the high-level conceptual stuff that did not matter to me in my goal of producing a report to an exandable link in a Help system – there if I want it, not there if I don’t. Deep Reading, the kind of reading I do when I read a novel, for example, or study a textbook, requires the proper mind-set. I cannot put myself in Deep Reading mode when I know I have a conference call in fifteen minutes, two people are at my desk, and my Inbox has 400 unread messages.

I would organize the commands by purpose not alphabetically. The Index is already an alphabetized list. I’d provide tons of real-world problems with the exact syntax for solving each.

Uh Oh

My shoulda/woulda/coulda list got me thinking. Am I doing all this today?  Sort of. On one of my projects, I added a nice What Would You Like to Do Next section to most of my help topics, which achieves a few goals. First, it gives readers a sense of direction. “I’m here and want to go there.” Second, it conveys sequence. “I’ve done X and Y and still need to do Z.”  It implies ordinance. “I’ve done X; now I can do Y.”

But I could do more. Sadly, I find so much of my ideals are sacrificed to the gods of project schedules and budgets.

So, that’s how Tom’s posts got me linking my past to my present. What do you do to address not just different audiences, but different ways of reading in your technical writing?

After several hours of editing, I was ready for a break. My sons gave me Microsoft’s new Kinect sensor for the Xbox game system and a Zumba game. Since I take a weekly Zumba class, I decided to give it a shot. I stood in the center of my living room with the Kinect sensor placed on top of my TV, directly in front of me. On-screen prompts were easy to follow. I only had to wave at the sensor and it detected my presence. I did a forty-minute Zumba workout and discovered, to my delight, that I did not have to exaggerate any movements or perform any complicated hand gestures in order to control the system. I had a great deal of fun with it and forgot I was playing a game.

Until I decided to stop.

I discovered stopping the game wasn’t so intuitive. There was no on-screen control for me to wave at. It took several minutes and then my son remembered the gesture for Stop. I think it was holding my right hand down and my left hand up at a 45-degree angle. In other words, users must memorize the Stop gesture.

Once I stopped the game and caught my breath, I started thinking. Have we, at long last, finally evolved past the Window and mouse as user interface and made the stuff of science fiction a reality? In Iron Man 2, Robert Downy, Jr. brings his hands together in a single clap and then pulls them apart to manipulate a 3D view of a map. In author Jeff Somers’ Avery Cates series, most of the technology in Cates’ world is operated by gesture. The iPad for example, employs a sort of pressure/gesture hybrid action to control it. Use a modified “tickle” gesture to turn pages and a two-finger pinch to minimize windows. Kinect employs a simple hand wave gesture to first control an on-screen cursor and then to play a game designed around natural body motion.

When software was anchored to a particular hard drive, it had to adhere to the standards established by the operating system. But as we reach for the Cloud to lease software, these standards no longer apply. Applications can now evolve past Windows and mouse-clicks in favor of more intuitive commands, based on the gesture.  The UI editing work I did this morning reminds me how important it is for the interface itself to provide useful information. While trying to stop my Zumba game, I looked for on-screen controls to wave at, but found none.  I wonder how a Gesture User Interface like Kinect could be adapted for basic office use, such as word processing?

What do you think about GUI evolution?

According to Gartner, 20% of businesses will own no IT assets by 2010. This doesn’t mean companies won’t need IT at all but does mean they’ll look to the cloud to lease services, equipment and software.   I like to compare this trend to the operation of a car.  How many of us have a driver’s license? How many licensed drivers understand how the car’s various systems work?  How many drivers can repair their car?   The shift toward non-ownership indicates businesses would rather pay for the benefits of IT without also having to care and feed it.

Also according to Gartner, context will be as influential to mobile consumer devices as search engines are to the web by 2015. While search engines pulled content from the web, context-enriched services will push information to users based on analysis of patterns. We’re already seeing this with Amazon’s book recommendations.  I think taxonomies and tagging will require more intent than content development itself.

This segues neatly into the next prediction, that by 2013, mobile phones will pass PCs as the most common device used to access the web, worldwide. As Gartner points out, users expect fewer clicks on mobile devices than on PCs but I also anticipate renewed vigor toward minimal content.  Windows is nearly twenty years old; I think we can now safely drop mouse-related terms like click, choose, and select from procedures, similar to this example posted by Julie Norris.  With this approach, content would be faster to develop, less expensive to translate, and easier to port to mobile devices.

These predictions make me wonder where our efforts will take place. Will tech-comm be outsourced to even greater degrees than we’re already seeing? What impact do you think shrinking IT staffs and budgets, and the commoditization of IT will have on tech-comm?

What you may not know about me is that I am – or maybe was is the appropriate verb – an introvert at heart. Growing up, I was the girl hiding in the shadows, her face pressed in a book.  Kids stole my toys, took my turns, took credit for my ideas because I never spoke up. When I grew up and went to work, it was more of the same thing as others got the raises and promotions that should have been mine.  I was doing great work but yet, wasn’t getting noticed.

As I got older, I learned speaking up is a critical business skill.  I took some Dale Carnegie courses (which are amazing and highly recommended). I got better at it but I’m still not entirely comfortable with it.

Meanwhile, a trend started on the internet. It began with lists, like TECHWR-L, morphed into blogs and social networks. Professional wisdom, experience, opinion and even disagreement – all collected and focused in a single point in time.  I cut my teeth on TECHWR-L, lurking and reading every message with great interest. Members of that list taught me how to be a technical writer.  But I rarely posted or replied to posts. I always thought I had no wisdom or experience to share.

Over the years since I began in this field, I have (I hope!) collected enough experiences to form opinions – wise or other-wise (ha!).  With Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and our various blogs, it’s become easier for me to express them. I comment on subjects in which I have experience, ask questions on those I don’t, connect with other professionals who continue to teach me and shape the information products I deliver. It’s a subtle thing but I’ve suddenly realized I have an abundance of confidence as a result of my connections to all of you.  I noticed it to last week during a meeting to discuss content strategy for a new product offering. My heart was not pounding. I was not sitting in dread, waiting for the moment where I would have to share. I was calm, interested, expressed my opinions and the world didn’t fall off its axis.

I am enjoying an unexpected benefit of social networking – confidence. Thank you all.

We’re still getting our feet wet with Agile, but I have one project that is a brand new product, which I’ll call X here.  In our old development process, X would have a series of requirements documents for each feature, plus a master requirements document that I would use as my base.  The descriptions in these docs provide a starting point for my external research (our products support other third-party apps), which in turn help me develop the right questions to ask to fully document the new system. But in our current Agile process, I have no requirements. All I have now is an entry in a sprint back log for one of the Product X features.  I’m supposed to be documenting this feature with no idea how it fits into the product. I know there is a forest out there, but I am stuck on one branch of one tree.

Where do I begin? I am essentially writing inside out. How can I fully document a feature during a sprint when the rest of the product is still being developed?

Based on the comments received from the Agile Tech Writers LinkedIn Group, the problem, it seems, isn’t with my process, but may be with me.  I’m still trying to work the same way I’ve always worked while Agile has changed that model. The questions I used to ask my development team no longer apply. From David Farbey, I learned instead of asking very specific questions regarding the feature’s use, I should be asking questions geared toward understanding its implementation and the advantages it provides to users.

In a comment from Chris D., who said Agile opens doors, I realized it’s no longer enough to sit and wait for information to trickle down to me. Nor must I track it down. Rather, I should be getting involved in the development effort, looking for places to influence interface design and being what technical communicators have always tried to be – “a true customer advocate.” Anne Gentle wrote in a recent post that “Being an active member of the Agile team is crucial to a writer’s success.”

Toward this end, I contacted the Product X Development team and asked when their scrum meetings take place. I’ll show up, listen while looking for places where I can add to the discussion, even though it may be too early in the process, at least from a traditional perspective. But my confidence is returning. I have a UI background, so I can certainly influence decisions there.

David F. also reminded me of a key point in Agile development: “Developers do not code an entire product release in a sprint.”  Yet, here I am, trying to document all of Product X during a single feature sprint. Ideally, the information I write for this feature would be modular and ready for integration into the full product doc set at some later date. It’s okay if I don’t have the whole picture now. It’s even okay that I state during scrum meetings that I can produce only X-related conceptual topics during this sprint.

The point, I have learned (thanks to Sara, Julio, Pat, David, Kat, Maya, Verner, Larry, Chris, and Pramod), is that Agile can be flexible and therefore, so should I.