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>Just a couple of minutes ago a new mail from my boss
>arrived with a new unplanned and urgent task. Here is
>what it said..
>
>"Please arrange a session ASAP for both programmers
>and QC about abbreviating, capitalizing, punctuation,
>and the sort. As simple as it may sound, it will save
>us a lot of precious time.
>
>Thanks."
>
> [...]
>neither the developers or the QC officers will ever
>listen.. and I will be going through the same
>mistakes in interface and demo data..
>
>Has any of you gone through this before? Please
>feedback with your valuable experiences...
I agree that such a meeting with developers and QC
will get close to zero results. Those who are remotely
interested in writing comprehensibly will already be
doing so, the others will sit there with their eyes
glazing over and learn nothing; if you upbraid them
later for faulty punctuation they will snap that they
have more important things to do than worry about
commas.
And they'll have a point. But so does your boss. Where
I work, it's the program managers and engineers who
write specifications (in faulty English to boot, I'm
in France), and we try to have the writers fit in an
informal (read: time not budgeted, so low-priority)
edit of these documents.
Difficult to know what to do. I'd suggest to your boss
that if this is both important enough to ask you to
drop what you're doing and simple enough to cover in a
meeting, then it will be better to produce a short,
simple guide covering *requirements* for use of
abbreviations, complete sentences, etc., and *then*
have a meeting to present the guide and inform
everyone that they have to use it. The guide and
meeting should be included among your time-budgeted
tasks. This will require higher-ups agreeing that this
is indeed a requirement for dev and QC; if it's not
official, with some kind of annoying consequence for
them if they ignore it, there's little hope of it
changing their practices. You'll just be in the
position of Dilbert's Tina the Tech Writer banging her
head on the wall.
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