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There is an article in the December 2000 issue of STC's "Intercom" that addresses documentation metrics. Asked to provide my observations regarding that article, I have written: "Mechanical (quantitative) metrics are not altogether useless, but they become much more useful when combined with more qualitative metrics."
That is the basic gist of the article, and in other words, I mostly agree. How long it takes you to edit or write pages is unimportant, except to managers. But what we really should all strive for is documentation that is useful and well-received, not documentation that was simply done quickly enough. (Obviously, the time it takes to produce a document should be reasonable; it just shouldn't be one of the primary metrics used.)
---Doug Grossman (Doug -dot- Grossman -at- SAS -dot- com)
-----Original Message-----
From: Michele Davis [mailto:michele -at- krautgrrl -dot- com]
You know how online help has a guideline of 4-6 hours per topic, well,
does editing have a guideline like that? 1-2 hours to edit a page of
technical documentation and check references? What are the opinions out
there?
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