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In order to be successful you *must* be part of the Scrum team. With
less written communication (specs) there is more verbal communication
(meetings, informal hallway conversations.) And that really means
that you need to be located in the same country, building, floor, and
office space as your teammates. If not, you totallly lose out on
information.
You really have to be considered a "pig" and not a "chicken" in the
Scrum meeting. (http://www.implementingscrum.com/2006/09/11/the-classic-story-of-the-pig-and-chicken/)
TWs tend to be second class citizens in a lot of dev oraganizations,
this is your chance to avoid that. Your company ships two things to
customers, product and doc. You have a customer facing deliverable.
Stress that. Get managment to back you.
Lagging a sprint behind is not a bad thing. I've heard of several
organizations that do that. Sometimes the code isn't checked in until
the last day or two of the sprint, so if you need to see screens to
document them, a sprint behind is just about the only way you can do
it.
And our organization has a quarterly "bug bash" week, where the team
only works on issues. So all those little piddly things can get fixed
then. Also, my team has on occasion let me edit the text strings!
*glee*
And as Peter noted, there are a wide variety of different ways to
implement Agile. They range from the poor end of the spectrum
(waterfall with daily standups and no specs) to the other end of the
spectrum where the team is completely empowered, runs itself, and has
reached optimum productivity that generates well tested code.
--
Julie Stickler http://heratech.wordpress.com/
Blogging about Agile and technical writing
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