I’d Rather Be Writing – Tom Johnson

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Duration: 28 min.

In this podcast, I interview Alyssa Fox, an information development manager at NetIQ, about technical writing in agile environments. Agile environments involve short iterations of product development, such as three to six weeks to complete a release, rather than the longer one to two years of product development before releases.

Writing in an agile environment requires a different authoring methodology. On Alyssa’s team, each writer attends scrum meetings for each project and completes the help by the end of each iteration (rather than waiting until the project’s end).

Topics in this podcast include:

• How writing in agile environments differs from writing in traditional waterfall environments
• Techniques to ensure thorough document review in agile environments
• Knowing when to attend meetings and when to skip them
• Properly allocating writers across multiple projects without losing efficiency
• Why authoring in the agile process results in higher quality documentation

Additional Resources

• Mobile and Agile: The Floating Writer’s Survival Kit, by Alyssa Fox and Meredeth Kramer
• STC Summit 55^th–Mobile and Agile: The Floating Writer’s Survival Kit (PowerPoint)
• Alyssa Fox on Twitter
• Alyssa’s email: alyssa dot fox at netiq.com
• Virtual Machines – IT Author Podcast

Tags: agile environments, alyssa fox, editor, editorial review, meetings, podcasts, quality, review process

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