I am once again on an Agile development team, and we are running into something similar I believe. There are heavy development tasks that I can’t do, but I would like to learn more about how to do them. So I am taking small steps towards learning more about the “guts” of the product I document. For example, since we work on a web application, it’s good for me to work on CSS bugs that come onto our board, if a developer is not available. I think the main thing to do is to be available and ready for any task – I don’t think you need to send your writers to special training for specialized development tasks. I think it’s okay for each team member to have a specialty. My specialty happens to intersect with web applications since I know web content management (and styling) well. I also test quite a lot (let me emphasize A LOT), following legacy test plans when it makes sense (we’re not creating new test plans in our Agile environment).

So, as usual, it depends on the product you’re working on. Are there any small-ish development tasks that are entry-level? Maybe start with those. But also realize you can keep training writers in their specialty and not ask them to become newly-trained specialists in programming or testing.

Also, as a technical writer, I frequently log bugs I find, although I am not following a test plan or covering an entire area of the app. I have also pointed out misses in terms of requirements that can sometimes get us off track. And, I sometimes get notes from developers who have input on how Help is worded or what content is included.

This being said, I don’t have it in my plan to learn development other than how it relates to documentation and/or training.
There are some borderline cases where I may need to learn a bit of development in order to get something I need implemented for doc/training because the dev team doesn’t have experience in that area.

Is this what others are experiencing?

Recently, I found an easier way to handle one such item…Release Notes. I estimate the entire task of creating Release Notes, then I divide that estimate by the number of expected sprints before functionality is delivered to clients. If the estimate is not easily divisible by that number, I add any extra time to the final sprint. During each sprint, I have a Release Notes task. In the first sprint, I create the document and add bug fixes/enhancements that are developed during that sprint. Reviews of this work should also be completed durint sprint one. When the sprint is finished, this part of the doc should also be finished. During each sprint, I add the part of the work that pertains to that sprint, and during the final sprint, I get final reviews and publish the doc in PDF. We use MS Word’s Track Changes feature to help reviewers know what is “new” for that sprint.

Hope this helps!

Yes, that discussion is useful: at least I can confidently say that there’s no standard up to now (my management is very much into doing things “the standard way”).
Doing automatic generations is a bit complicated for me as AuthorIT and Acrobat both have tendencies to freeze in the middle of a generation, requiring manual re-starts.
I think the real questions are
* when will anyone actually need the documentation?
* when will anyone actually read the documentation?
* when is the latest date when I will have time to produce the documentation before outputting to real clients?
In my organization, the iterations stay within a small circle of people inside the company, who aren’t great documentation readers.

Cheers,
Francis

As you might imagine, the answer is, it depends. It depends on the maturity of the product, and how detailed the designs are up front, and whether you’re on a team that tends to throw out first prototypes that are coded. It also depends on how modular and topic-oriented your documentation is already.

Your deliverable description is also interesting – not many Agile shops that I know of would be manually generating doc, instead it would be automated (even the file copying), and maybe part of the product build. So you may also look into automation so the process is less manual and time-consuming.

Hope that helps! I’d encourage you to post your question to the Content Wrangler Community as well to get more perspectives.