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> ...Currently the overall schedule shows
> us as content complete one week before we burn the product to disk. We've
> got about a month between the code freeze and the docs freeze. This makes me
> nervous. Does this seem like a reasonable amount of time to finish up?
There IS no "reasonable amount of time" to finish docs. There is only what you
manage to defend. And because docs follow development, usually docs pay for
development slips.
It is admirable that you want to test the docs before you release them. What a
wonderful goal! In our experience, testing of the docs is one of those things
that can get caught in the last-minute crunch, and you may have to slip it
entirely. The one place I've seen a commitment to testing the docs work was one
of our contracts a year ago at a very large software/hardware company, where the
QA department in this division had a lot of leverage and was flexible enough to
know that they could test the docs at the final review stage if the project
schedule slippage compromised their own dedicated testing time.
In most development projects, things tend to pile up at the end of the schedule,
and docs tend to take the biggest hit, no matter how carefully you've negotiated
room to do the job right. The best you can do is identify what's vital, what's
negotiable, and what kind of support you have when you draw your department's
line in the sand. AND keep your writers informed.
Elna Tymes
Los Trancos Systems
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