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> > Problem: I am trying to document a product that is still being
> > developed, not just tweaked.
James Owen wrote:
snip
> Management may warn you away from distracting the programmers.
> Ignore management if you can. The programmers are your most
> valuable resource.
Too true! This happened to me in one company. Tech Pubs were
told in a meeting not to talk to developers because they
were too busy and to get information from QA. QA were told
in a separate meeting not to talk to developers because
they were too busy. Where QA were supposed to get information
from no-one knew. At this point QA and Tech Pubs raised
merry hell and the product manager, who'd been making these
statements, was forced to retract what he'd said.
This was the same product manager who, a month earlier, had
said that Tech Pubs and QA should be more "pro-active" and
be the ones to ask the developers what the changes were,
rather than wait to be spoon-fed the information.
It can also help if you can get the development or
product managers on your side to make sure that the
developers know officially that it's part of their job
to inform Tech Pubs what changes are happening, review
documentation and generally to regard documentation as
an essential part of product development.
Katharine Woods
kathw -at- firefox -dot- co -dot- uk
