RE: Quality of source material from Development

[Salan Sinclair <salansinclair -at- shaw -dot- ca>]

Your situation is exactly what my friend is trying to get started --
developers provide and maintain a spreadsheet that lists the command syntax,
description, and other technical reference material. The tech writers can
refer to this spreadsheet when writing and maintaining customer documents.
Other posts indicate this situation is rare.
But thanks for letting me know it actually does occur elsewhere.

Salan

Sandy Harris wrote:

A division I've seen work well in several projects is that programmers
write Unix man pages (or the equivalent on other systems), terse highly
technical reference material. I then write other things -- documentation
for end users, tutorial material for developers using the API, design
rationale docs to help sell the product, procedural info for system
administrators, ... -- whatever else is needed.

One very handy side effect of this is that I can use the version control
system to track changes to the man pages. This means I learn of most
software changes that affect my docs, without having to rely on
developers remembering to email me about them.

This requires that the programmers be literate and that their management
include documenting the code as part of their requirements. Neither of
those is always the case, but in my experience both often are.



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