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Subject:RE: Estimating Online Help Development From:"Pickett, Beth" <beth_Pickett -at- ncs -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Thu, 30 May 2002 10:42:07 -0500
Thanks to all who responded. To clarify, we just need a ball park-ish
percentage. To us, "online help development" generally means all steps from
researching and writing the original text to final delivery to the software
developers, including editing, copyediting, proofreading, reviews,
revisions, linking to the app, and compiling. We write for Windows and Web,
and the same steps mostly apply to both. For estimating purposes, one of our
assumptions is that the complexity of the help correlates to the complexity
of the app.
An example of our scenario: of the 10,000 hours allocated for software
development for a particular product, we have been allocated 800 to develop
the help, which won't cut it, given the considerable complexity of the
subject matter, the complexity of the software, and the number of steps we
must follow (we're CMM3). We know the hours we need to do the work, and
we've told the PM, but the software developers are still hogging the hours.
We're looking for a simple, compelling, and substantiated way to state our
case, like "Every software company in the world, especially those that are
CMM3, allocates 30% of software development hours to developing user
documentation/online help, so what's the problem here? Give us 30% of those
hours!" We just need someone out there to state that this is true in their
development environment so we have some fire power, that's all.
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