Re: Interview what Interview? (WAS: Capturing info during meeting s with SMEs)

[dmbrown -at- brown-inc -dot- com]

Eric and Connie,

My situation is the same (four years and all).  A favorite example was when we recently added a few new functions to the API.  I was in on the planning meetings, as usual, and to make sure I understood the nuances of the various parameters we had discussed, I wrote up draft doc pages with usage statements, example calls, and so on.

In writing the examples, I came up with several suggestions and questions that led to improvements...all before a line of code had been written.

The developer (who sits next to me when we're in the office) posted the finished draft pages to the formal specifications area on the intranet and thanked me for saving him the time to write the specs himself.

Best of all, I'd finished the docs and was ready to move on to the next thing.

I've worked in places where it was done the other way:  scheduling meetings with developers who grumbled about having to attend and writers who worried that they might miss something, or just waiting for the developers to "throw the software over the wall" and leave the writers to figure it out for themselves.

I can't imagine going back.

--David 
 
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