Information Development /Technical Writing / Technical Documentation in an Agile Environment

2. Agenda The transition to an Agile environment 1 Planning the transition 2 InfoDev considerations 3 What changed in the Agile model? 4 Lessons learnt 5

3. Agile Terminology Backlog Prioritized list of requirements User story Requirement formulated in the everyday business language of the user Feature breakdown Process of breaking down features/requirements into small estimable user stories Iteration/Sprint Single development cycle, usually measured in weeks Hardening iteration Iteration dedicated to eliminate technical debt, including bugs, integration testing, final QA, docs, etc. Scrum team Cross-functional team working on a set of user stories

4. Our Agile roadmap 2010 2009 Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 * All numbers approximate

6. Planning the transition Presentation Identifier Goes Here

7. Initial reactions “ No more feature freeze! We can now add features in the last iteration if we need to.” Product management “ No more FDDs!” Engineering “ No FDDs? Hold on … we probably need to discuss the process again.” QA, InfoDev “ Can’t we ship the product when Development is done? Do you really need the hardening iterations?”

9. Team Organization and Communication Team Charter Composition InfoDev representative Release Team Cross-functional team driving the release One representative from each functional group Lead/Manager Team of N Cross-functional team driving a theme or a feature set PM, TPM, Support, Dev, QA, Testing, InfoDev Lead writer for theme/feature set Scrum team Cross-functional team executing on a feature set Dev, QA, InfoDev Writer working on the feature set Release Team Team of N #3 Scrum Team 1 Scrum Team 2 Team of N #2 Scrum Team 3 Scrum Team 4

11. Information Development considerations

13. InfoDev tasks during an iteration

14. Documentation review process

15. Authoring and review cycles Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4 Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4 Sprint n Sprint n+1

16. What changed in the Agile model?

19. What did we learn?

22. Neeraj Bhatia [email_address]