RE: Extreme Technical Writing (was RE: Flexibility and changing r equirements)

[Phoebe Minias <phoebe -at- MIT -dot- EDU>]

Hi Lisa,

My focus is the kind of project documentation you describe. I am the lone 
technical writer in the IT group that supports the Student Information 
System at MIT. We have a permanent client base that includes the 
Registrar's Office, Student Financial Services, Admissions, and other 
groups involved in student services. For a variety of reasons, this 
organization went along for years without any kind of formal structure for 
development or documentation. I'm part of a relatively new team that has 
responsibility for infrastructure issues.

We are attempting to implement a sort of agile development methodology in 
an environment where nothing formal has really existed before (wish us 
luck). The idea is to approach this from the bottom up. As part of this 
effort we are trying to determine what should comprise the minimum required 
documentation, starting from the business analysis phase through comments 
in the code. The hope is to keep the documentation lightweight and flexible 
enough so that it won't be too much of a burden to write (I will be guiding 
the writing in collaboration with the developers and application team 
leaders). We also want to write the documentation with an eye to 
reusability and are looking in a very preliminary way at using XML and the 
DITA architecture to do so.

I'm really enjoying thinking about the documentation (although it is very 
challenging) precisely because it needs to be so minimalist and bare-bones 
in approach. I've also learned a ton about software development and 
object-oriented analysis (I found Ambler's second edition of The Object 
Primer to be an excellent overview, very pragmatic, with tons of good 
examples).

I have also gotten a lot of great information from this list and would 
enjoy corresponding with anyone who's working on a similar project. (Anyone 
else in academia out there, besides Valerie Priester?)

Phoebe