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Subject:Re: AW: How do hiring companies view TW resumes? From:Chris Despopoulos <despopoulos_chriss -at- yahoo -dot- com> To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com Date:Wed, 24 Mar 2010 04:58:05 -0700 (PDT)
Design docs are usually measured by meeting predictable deadlines. They're considered a part of project management, and so are measured by that standard. But here's one of my soap boxes... Tech writers can and should provide more value than merely producing pages of user documentation. Organizing and clarifying the design process is a whopping-huge opportunity for adding value. It resists outsourcing, and it gets the writer directly involved at the very start of the project. And it fits well with Agile.
On your resume you would say something like, "I managed and maintained the design documents (ooo... maybe even designed them?) for the X project. Our team met every milestone on or before deadline. Our product generated X revenue."
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On design documents such as use cases or requirement docs, here's an
idea: the cost of bugs can be quantified as the payroll cost of the
rework time needed to fix them. Some of those bugs will result not from
programming or database mistakes, but from the design docs not being
followed properly. Those are what I call procedure-fail bugs. Sift the
bug reports and identify the procedure-fail bugs. Then claim that if
the docs had been read and followed in the first place, the company
could have saved the rework costs of those procedure-fail bugs.
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