RE: Need feedback

[John Posada <JPosada -at- book -dot- com>]

I was at a gig where I was doing a help system and the QA person insisted on
emailing me with defects, many of which were how help itself was designed.
Example...when she would search for a word or phrase, all applicable help
pages would be displayed with every instance in reverse video. of course,
since she was checking the ability to search, she used terms that she was
certain would appear....many times on a page.

She wanted only one instance of a hit to be highlighted. After many such
instances, I told her manager that I would only pay attention to a defect if
it was logged in the system. He said GREAT...until I showed him that I'd
received about 75 emails, and since the company had a policy of not
releasing the product until no bugs for that release were still open, he
quickly realized that her entries would cause the delay of the release...

...he spoke with her and the number went from 3-5 a day to 1-2 a week.

John Posada
Senior Technical Writer
Barnes&Noble.com
jposada -at- book -dot- com
212-414-6656
icq: 178047452
aim: jposada1
  "When you only have two minutes to do 
  something that takes three, wait until you have three"


-----Original Message-----
From: Michelle Petersen [mailto:mpetersen74 -at- cox -dot- net]
Sent: Friday, March 28, 2003 11:58 AM
To: TECHWR-L
Subject: Re: Need feedback



I ran into a similar situation at my last company with a few overzealous
product managers. I had tried sending out "reviewer checklists" with my docs
at first, but the product managers basically ignored these and commented on
everything, whether it was in their review scope or not. To deal with the
problem, I ended up doing a variation on what John and Eric suggested:
treated their "suggestions" like a "bug" and implemented a very simple "doc
bug" tracking database in Access. 

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