Professional Documents
Culture Documents
• Scrum !?!
• Software Development Models
• Agile Methods and Scrum
• Technical Writers in Scrum Teams
• Some Difficulties
• Conclusions
Scrum !?!
Scrum in rugby
• The method of beginning play in which the forwards of
each team crouch side by side with locked arms
• Play starts when the ball is thrown between them and
the two sides compete for possession.
[Source: http://www.thefreedictionary.com]
Installation
popular and widely used
Maintenance
• Applied against unstructured approach
(cowboy coding or code-and-fix model)
April 2008 - STC-TAC Conference - Techwriters in scrum teams 7
… and also:
• Establishes a rigid separation of roles & responsibilities
• Results in treating people as a factor of production
• Discourages cooperation across departments conflicts:
- Marketing vs Technical dept: stability of requirements
- Development vs QA: quality and usability of software
• Technical communicators always try to make peace,
don’t we?
April 2008 - STC-TAC Conference - Techwriters in scrum teams 9
Agile Methods
• Agile methods as reaction to processes that look good
in theory but that often do not hold up in practice
• Empirical and based entirely on practical experiences
and work methods that are proven to work
• Central concept is adaptation to change
• List includes: Extreme Programming (XP), Scrum, …
[Source: Scrum in five minutes, www.softhouse.se]
• … and then
successful use of Scrum in several SW projects
[Courtesy of www.implementingscrum.com]
April 2008 - STC-TAC Conference - Techwriters in scrum teams 25
Scrum Room
27
Opportunities
• At least one Technical Writer is part of a cross-functional
Scrum team
• Our role is definitely more important and we can follow
the development of new products right from the start
• Project visibility: we become part of the transfer of
learning
• New job opportunities for techwriters in Scrum projects
April 2008 - STC-TAC Conference - Techwriters in scrum teams 28
Basic Tasks
• Ensure that the documentation tasks are properly
defined at the beginning of each Sprint
• Define the terms of documentation completeness
• Attend and participate actively in relevant meetings
• Complete the documentation tasks in the sprints
• Keep the global documentation release in mind
New tasks
• Opportunities beyond our classic job profile
• User Stories (Agile methods)
• Use Cases (UML)
• Usability studies
• Scrum is channeling creativity in focused and productive
ways
New capabilities
• Formal languages, UML - Unified Modeling Language
• Knowledge of software engineering standards and
techniques
• Develop sufficient skills to actively follow the daily
meeting with software specialists and to interact with
them effectively
• Information may not be available in formal
specifications
April 2008 - STC-TAC Conference - Techwriters in scrum teams 31
Some Difficulties
37
A Cultural Clash
• Typically lone writer in the team
• Sort of alien in the technical team
• Initial exclusion: “we do not have anything for you to
document yet”; “we do not need you in the Scrum yet”
• Communication difficulties, technical jargon or
terminology
Collecting information
• Incomplete or missing specifications:
some technical document may be optional in Scrum
• Technical details are discussed in meetings and not
formalized
• Preliminary and unstable software
• Rapidly changing design
Short schedules
• Short delivery schedules:
product release become monthly iteration release
• Detailed tasks estimations
• Timesheet reporting by the hour
• After a while, team may be very productive, hard to
keep up
Estimation skills
• Activity planning and tracking is very detailed during
the Sprints
• Activity reporting is public knowledge
• Keep detailed track of time spent for each activity
• Difficulties can be an opportunity to improve our
estimation skills
[Source: C.M.Sigman, Adapting to Scrum: Challenging and Strategies, Intercom July 2007]
Conclusions
45
That’s it!
Questions? Comments?
Ask now or contact me later at:
piero.margutti@operans.it
References
Articles
• W. Royce , Managing The Development Of Large Software Systems, in IEEE WESCON Proceedings, Aug 1970
• H.Takeuchi , I.Nonaka , The New New Product Development Game , in Harvard Business Review, Jan-Feb 1986
• C.Sigman, Adapting Challenges and Strategies to Scrum , Intercom magazine Jul-Aug 2007
• T.Berry, A.Gentle, Writing End–User Documentation in an Agile Development Environment, CIDM, Jun 2006
Books
• P.DeGrace , L.H. Stahl, Wicked Problems, Righteous Solutions , 1998
• K.Schwaber , M.Beedle, Agile Software development with Scrum, 2001
• David Churchville, Agile Thinking, Leading Successful Software Projects and Teams, 2008
• J.Carrol, The Nurnberg Funnel: Designing Minimalist Instruction for Practical Computer Skill, 1990
• J.Carrol, Minimalism Beyond the Nurnberg Funnel, 1998
Web links
• www.implementingscrum.com www.scrumalliance.org
• www.agilemanifesto.org www.controlchaos.com
• www.rapidinnovation.ning.com www.infomanagementcenter.com