Keep on churning - Agile technical writing

While reading Walter Bodwell's Blog entry (Incremental Development), I was reminded of a couple recent conversations. The first occurred during the Agile2006 conference when one of the attendees asked me if Agile introduced a lot of "churn" in the documentation process.

The answer is "yes, sometimes." But think of it as a feature, and not a bug. :-)

The second conversation occurred a couple days ago when a developer and I were commiserating about how we were having to rework a seemingly finished feature. While everyone involved wants to keep feature rework to a minimum among iterations, you also need to strive for releasability at the end of each iteration. Sometimes remaining releasable means that you need to rework the documentation, and maybe more than once. If it's any comfort, you're not alone. If you need to rework the documentation, your development and QA counterparts are also in the same boat (and QA needs to retest the code and the documentation).

One of the challenges for writers is to stay with development. Sometimes we complain that we don't learn about feature details until it's too late, causing the documentation to lag behind the code. On the flip side, we can't get ahead of development either. Every once in a while, QA blocks acceptance of one of my tasks because I've documented more functionality than what the developers are delivering in that iteration. You're not releasable if the documentation describes features that don't exist in the product. Fortunately, HTML and FrameMaker make it easy to comment out that sort of documentation failure.

Tip: If you want to get a jump on some tasks in upcoming iteration, use conditional text (FrameMaker) and commented text (HTML). Because we're Agile, verify that development actually implemented the feature the way you documented it in a earlier iteration.