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Subject:docs: out of the box - off the shelf From:shankAtIndiaDotcom <ss_rajanala -at- yahoo -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Thu, 6 May 2004 22:15:48 -0700 (PDT)
Some thoughts on docs bundled with products and
off-the-shelf books.
The difficulties in creating off-the-shelf
quality docs are:
- the product keeps changing till the end, and
we are supposed to ship with product.
- authors of books out there have a product to
work on, and a few months to hit the market after
product release; also, they have base docs that
are bundled with s/w (if not informative, they
can tell the author what is confusing and focus
on those areas :-)
- the engineers get in the way often: they tell
us not only how the product behaves but also how
to state the behavior. A crude example would be
someone insisting "Null value is not excepted."
where it is more u-friendly to say "You must
enter a value for xyz" or such.
- In the case of outsourced work that some of us
do "off shore" the problem is compounded because
(as stated above) our primary job is to please
the internal clients "on shore" and not worry so
much about end users or standards. If the powers
that be dictate that checkbox is one word, I fix
all my 'check boxes' in the doc globally. Ugly?
unuser-friendly? but hey, who pays the piper
calls the spaces...
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