Agile Development and Technical Communications

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Comment by Anne Gentle on June 6, 2008 at 12:23am

I just wanted to stop by and say that the image for this group is one of my favorites. :)

Comment by Mike Wethington, CSP on April 21, 2008 at 10:05am

Hi Nikki: Welcome to the group.

Do you have a PM on your projects or a Scrum Master? You probably should sit down with them 1st and find out what exactly is the methodology that you are using. Most teams use their own flavor of Agile so its good to know those details.

Basically there are a couple of things that you should know right off:

At the end of every Sprint (2,3, or 4 weeks) it should be possible to release the product. That means that Doc & QA all need to be completed by the end of each sprint for the set of tasks in that Sprint.

Daunting as this may seem, the important thing is to get your Dev teams to thinly slice the tasks so that you can clearly see what is documentable and what is strictly code. Once you get that level of granularity Agile gets much easier.

Use Cases, Themes, and Stories for each release factor into this as well but the actual day-to-day work centers around Tasks.

Other musts: Assign writers to each daily standup. This is where the reality of the Sprint is revealed.

Also, you may need to shuffle people so they can focus on one or two features sufficiently. Continuity through a release for one writer is fairly important since your dealing with such small iterations.

There are a couple of dozen other things that would be helpful to do. Start with these and float more questions to the group. We're all glad to help.
Mike

Comment by Nikki Bridwell on April 17, 2008 at 1:50pm

Agile? What's Agile?
Hi - Director of TP here. Basically it seems as though we were thrown into TFS (Team Foundation Server) and the Agile methodology overnight. While I stand behind this 100%, it's hard to wrap my mind around it when internally, we haven't even discussed process changes. Any suggestions/information on how we/documentation fit into the grand scheme of things?