The Agile Technical Writer

The Darwin Information Typing Architecture method and Agile are often used hand-in-hand, as we do at my software shop.

The advantages, once the learning curve has been climbed, are a faster writing methodology with more topic reusability. The disadvantages can be (1) cursing under your breath when you can’t do something you want to do (2) the learning curve, and (3) a seemingly more rigid working style.

About number 3, I said “seemingly” because at first, I really felt that way, because sometimes adding components like notes in steps requires putting the note in a wrapper (another tag, “info” to be precise), which seems like an extra step. After I got used to some of these differences, I found that, in fact, DITA is a very flexible methodology for technical communicators on Agile Scrum teams. Building documents with DITA’s single-focus topics (a concept, task, or reference), provides enormous flexibility when working in Agile, where deliverables are produced continually and there is almost no downtime.

Creating multiple documents in many different formats is supported quite nicely with DITA. For example, I have created a user guide, administration guide, installation guide, and getting started guide, all with some common topics and reused text, but arranged in different ways with ditamaps (groups of topics). This method also provides flexibility to create some topics in sync with an agile “sprint” to document the feature iteratively. For example,  first you might write the conceptual information in Sprint 1, and add the task steps in Sprint 2, and reference topics in Sprint 3, after most of the feature is fleshed out, including a more solid user interface. This method works quite well on a fast-moving Agile team.

Just some musings on one methodology that I use with Agile. I am very interested in how others manage documentation workloads in Agile shops. Please post your ideas.

Agilely yours,

Diana

The Agile Technical Writer