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Subject:Re: Pages Per Day From:"Julie Stickler" <jstickler -at- gmail -dot- com> To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com Date:Thu, 27 Mar 2008 14:55:10 -0400
On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 1:04 PM, Gene Kim-Eng <techwr -at- genek -dot- com> wrote:
> The theoretical "two pages per day" figure covers
> the entire publication process, so it includes the
> effort required for planning, reviews, updates and
> final release.
Gene is absolutely correct.
Jim said that at the "kick off" meeting they were told that they had
four days to crank out the documentation. Which is why I asked how
long they were planning for the coding phase? In my mind, the writer
should have access to specifications and test builds, which should let
you get a running start on writing your documentation long before the
developers get to "code complete." Jim's already got enough
information to come up with a page count estimate, so he is at least
into the planning phase. Which just makes me wonder how far into the
project they are, and what exactly they were "kicking off" at this
meeting?
Waiting until the end of the cycle to bring in documentation is a pet
peeve of mine. Several years ago, two days before product ship date,
a product manager suddenly realized that we also needed an upgrade
guide. He asked me if two days was enough time to write one? I was
new on the product, but it didn't take me long to find that our
upgrade guides were usually about 200 pages long, and to figure out
that we actually had three different upgrade paths, which meant not
one guide, but three. We didn't have enough upgrading customers to
hold up the release, but his "little two day project" ended up being
several weeks of work.
I hate it when people think that documentation will somehow just
magically appear. Code takes time to write and test. And you need
time to plan, research, write, and test documentation too.
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