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The content will never be complete. The code will never freeze (though a baseline might). Bug reports will continue to pour in. You are striving towards an impossible ideal. Sorry about that. There are huge grey areas like unidentified bugs, UI inconsistencies, workarounds, performance of the app under stress, performance with data you didn't test for, tutorial hand-holding type information for newbies, unforeseen workflows, obscure reference material, stuff that should go in release notes, info for a solutions DB on the web, etc.
You need to define a minimum quantity/quality of content for commercialization. Plan to get this done ASAP, like half way through the production cycle.
In my experience you spend 10 per cent of the time getting the doc 90 per cent done and the rest of the time perfecting it. Also, the sooner you get the early drafts in, the sooner you can get approval from the rest of the group, e.g. engineering, commercialization, marketing, so you know you're on the right track.
Don't plan to do something really great a week before commercialization. Plan to do something rather good several months before commercialization, then leave yourself time to work on the enhancements. Put it another way -- you can't tweek / enhance / improve something that doesn't exist yet! It's only OK to work right up to the last minute if you're working on items not essential to success, otherwise you're skating on thin ice [instert fav. metaphor here].
John Cornellier
At 00:44 06.12.2000, Pam Mandel wrote:
>I'm the new manager of the Tech Writing team in a software startup. We're
>putting together version 1.0 of our product now. We've been fiercely
>scheduling for the last several months - I've met with the writers, the
>program managers, the dev leads, the writers again, and we've got tentative
>dates for our documentation schedule. The docs schedule is now linked in to
>the engineering schedule, and voila, we're scheduled. Fictionally, anyway.
>So here's my question. I'm striving for a content complete date - when we're
>all done writing, except to fix bugs. 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's no test time for the docs if we finish up a week before we burn. Is
>this a pretty typical scenario for content complete? I imagine we'll just
>have to suck it up and order a lot of take out in that last month, but I'd
>like to mitigate where possible. I don't want my team to hate me when this
>is over.
>Advice?
>Thanks.
>
>Pam
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