Re: Importance of Technical Writing

["Miller, Marlene" <mmiller -at- federatedinv -dot- com>]

Sona Mehta <sona -dot- mehta -at- haysmt -dot- co -dot- uk> wrote:
>I thought of giving a presentation to the
> developers in my office, telling them about TW in general.

An approach we tried here that worked wonders was inviting developers from
the different project groups to give presentations in *our* staff meetings.
The give-and-take of questions and answers during and after the presentation
was much more informative for both sides than sitting them down and
"telling" them what we do. 

That's how we found out that development teams in our company have learned,
through trial and error, that they must cut down on the analysis phase,
quickly produce something tangible like a working prototype, and then spend
more time in the QA/Testing/Beta phase, even if it often means completely
reworking a project. They don't like working that way, but they learned that
if they spend too much time in analysis with nothing to demonstrate,
management is more likely to squash a project and look elsewhere for a
solution. Once our group realized that, we stopped bashing our heads against
the "we should be involved early" wall and looked for ways to be more
helpful in QA/Testing, where the developers had more time to be cooperative.