RE: maintaining a list of changes in User Guides between versions

Subject: RE: maintaining a list of changes in User Guides between versions
From: "Sarah Bouchier" <Sarah -dot- Bouchier -at- exony -dot- com>
To: <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2007 09:48:42 -0000

My documents are held in a version control system; every time I change
something I therefore have to check out and check in with a change
description, even if that's only 'minor stylistic changes' or
'reformatted because I'm an eejit who mucked up the setup of the Word
numbering'

This access to a revision history has been /very helpful/ on various
occasions; when I received a complaint that certain items that should
have been removed from the online help (which uses the same source as
the User Guide) had made their way back in, I was able to go through the
revision history and track down that they'd never been removed; instead
of asking the technical author responsible (we used to be a team of two)
to make the changes, the developers had simply written the build script
to omit those items, and when the help was edited to shift some of the
files around it had, of course, broken the 'fix'.

Without a revision history, I might never have worked out what had
happened and thus known to have the necessary chat with the developers
about information flow :)

If someone asked me for a list of changes I'd simply go through the
revision history and pick out everything significant.

I thought using version control was fairly standard?

-----------------------------------------
Sarah Bouchier
Technical Author

exony
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References:
RE: maintaining a list of changes in User Guides between versions: From: Gordon McLean

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