Does working in an Agile development environment change the documentation plan, or user information plan?
For many writers, the purpose of a doc plan is to inform the stakeholders what you (or your team) intends to deliver for docs for a particular product release and when you will meet key milestones.
Here’s an outline of a typical user information plan that includes signoffs from interested parties, with the goal being that you work with your team to agree to what information deliverables are necessary for a software release to be complete.
- List of deliverables
- Risks and dependencies
- New features
- Documentation milestones and deadlines
- Techpubs expectations and assumptions for meeting the deadlines
That outline was from an actual doc plan from about three years ago. It was feature-dependent and waterfall-driven.
In an Agile environment, the doc plan might be more minimalist, listing only:
- key players
- release theme and top features in the release
- dates
Then the real work of planning the details of what needs to be addressed in the doc happens during iteration planning. The detailed planning may not be written down in a doc plan, spending the time on writing the end-user doc instead.
I suppose the most Agile doc plan would be a simple verbal agreement to what will be in the doc each iteration.
If there’s a sliding scale, what is the least Agile doc plan? What is the most Agile doc plan?