Technical Writers Get Agile
Agile Technical Writer Jobs
If you want to be at the cutting edge of technical writer jobs these days it may be time to go Agile.
Agile refers to a software development methodology that is vastly different from the way most large companies write software. No feasibility analysis, no functional specifications – just an agreement on the basic idea and the developers start writing code. The idea is to see what works and to iterate quickly to get to some kind of working prototype as fast as humanly possible. Then throw it out to users and see what happens. They collect user input, and bugs, fix and patch and keep on going.
So how the heck do you write technical documentation in this environment. Well, at first you don’t. The very first versions are usually very basic, and they had better be easy to use. An Agile environment thrives on simplicity. In the Agile Manifesto they put it this way:
“Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential”
At first the technical writer’s job is to do as little documentation as you can get away with. Focus on the interface.
Once things are working a bit better and the product starts to take on some complexity, Agile technical writers usually use a wiki as the documentation platform.
They write and track posts on the wiki and let the users in. The great thing about using a wiki as a documentation platform is that as soon as you write something and hit Save, it is live and every user now has access to it. No publishing documents or compiling Help files.
Here are a couple of pages written by Agile technical writers talking about how they do things.
http://ffeathers.wordpress.com/2008/01/20/the-agile-technical-writer/
http://www.atlassian.com/agile/people/technical-writer.jsp
So be on the lookout for Agile technical writer jobs. This is where technical writer jobs and careers are heading, so the quicker you get on board, the further ahead you will be.
