Re: Agile Blogs?

[quills -at- airmail -dot- net]

If you search the archives here for Agile you will find several threads 
about it.

One thing that has always bothered me about Agile is that there isn't 
ANY provision for improving your documentation, corrections of errors or 
process improvement, or even redesign. Once in an Agile you don't have 
the ability to work past that in redesign of output or process, unless 
you have downtime between scrums.

The other problem, as has been stated before, is that the implementation 
by the developers is always the crux of the problem. Information flow is 
crucial, and if they get it in their head that they don't have to give 
adequate documentation in their "specification" you are going to find 
lots of surprises.

arroxaneullman -at- aol -dot- com wrote:
>  IMO the greatest difficulty in the conversion process is the backlog which doesn't fit in with anyone else's schedule. It seemed impossible to get caught up on the things I'd been told to accomplish while attending every product's scrum? and being chained to the development/QA sprints. (As the sole writer, there's no one else who can do these things.) I felt like I needed to clone myself--several times over.
>
> Agile has allwed us to reevaluate our prioritities and removed some of the items on the doc backlog (or at least decrease their priority). However, I still feel that you cannot be fully integrated into the Agile SDLC if you begin with products that are undocumented or have out of date or patchy documentation.
>
> They call it a sprint, but some of us start running several miles behind everyone else, on multiple tracks, in different directions, and are still expected at the same finish line. Where's the sanity? 
>
> And while I'm asking semi-rhetorical questions about Agile, what's up with JBGE documents? 
>
> ;)
> Arroxane
>
>
>  
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Julie Stickler <jstickler -at- gmail -dot- com>
> To: arroxaneullman -at- aol -dot- com
> Cc: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
> Sent: Mon, 2 Mar 2009 12:48 pm
> Subject: Re: Agile Blogs?
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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>
>
> On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 1:27 PM,  <arroxaneullman -at- aol -dot- com> wrote:
>   
>> ?We started converting to agile a little over six months ago.
>> There's only so many ways you can politely and politically correctly say "this 
>>     
> sucks."
>
> We just finished our first Sprint, and so far I really don't have any
> major complaints.  I'm just not sure how I fit into the process.  I've
> created a documentation backlog that is separate but part of the
> development backlog (I'm new on the job, and they didn't have a tech
> writer for several months, so there's a lot of catching up to do for
> the time being).  I'm part of all the team meetings, the daily stand
> ups, the sprint planning and sprint retrospectives.  And my manager is
> really eager to have my processes mirror the developer's processes as
> much as possible.  I've told him that my work processes don't exactly
> mirror the developers, and he's pretty OK with that.
>
> The developers are still figuring out how Agile is going to work here,
> so they're not a whole lot of help in defining my role on the team.
> They seem to think it will just work itself out somehow.  And it
> probably will, I'm just impatient to know how it will turn out.  The
> upside of that is that *I* get to establish how the tech writer fits
> into our Agile processes.   At the moment I'm one writer only dealing
> with a single scrum team.   I'm really curious to hear from other
> writers how they fit into their teams, or don't.
>
> Julie
>
>   

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