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During the course of my work on various projects as a Technical Author, I adopted the Agile methodology to author and update documents while I collaborated with software engineers. I aim to help Technical Authors who have not worked in the Agile environment catch up on the trend. I did come across many posts by Technical Authors regarding their helpnessness to catch up with the development team who uses this methodology which prompted me to write this post.
What is Agility?
Agility in English means moving quickly, lightly and gracefully. For years, our software industry followed traditional methods to manage software development and consequently documentation.
Why Agility?
Then, a question arose, do we have to be so rigid? Don’t we realize as we design, then develop that we missed some feature that could be crucial or required by our end user right away? Do we refuse such requests because they were never a part of the Specifications? This compelled experts / veterans to rethink our time and tested strategy. Should we not become adaptive? While a certain amount of rigidity is necessary to set a path to design our software products, we have to take note of certain change requests too.
How as Technical Authors do we implement Agilty?
This scenario set the stage for Agile software development. This framework promotes adaptive planning. This implies that as you design features in various iterations, you must update your documents in parallel. A slight update to the Waterfall coined term “feature” in the Agile world is the hierarchy of Themes, Epics, User Stories and Tasks. So, in essence a Theme drills down to Epics which in turn drill down to User Stories that are broken down into manageable Tasks. So, as a documentation expert, you have to align your documentation with these objectives and chart your plans accordingly. So folks, agility is about collaborating too. :)
