Comments for David Farbey, Technical Writer

Comment on Doc tasks in the sprint – for the first time by Cathy

Cathy — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 14:06:58 +0000

I’ve worked both within the stories, and as separate stories in the sprint. I find that keeping the tasks within the stories results in more engaged dev team members, since the points don’t get claimed until the docs are done! (Documentation is part of our Definition of Done.)

However, if it is clear that the docs wouldn’t be able to complete in the sprint, I have moved them off to their own stories, broken out so that I can complete the story in the sprint. I have to admit that this is more because I hate to hold up stories than because it was the “right” thing to do.

The other thing I do now is include writing tasks unrelated to any particular story, but related to the product as my own Technical Communication story. For example, if I need to do some indexing or write some overview material, I create a story. This ensures that the right amount of QC time is allocated, and helps the team understand what you do with your time

Comment on Doc tasks in the sprint – for the first time by Brenda

Brenda — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 18:25:48 +0000

Going through the same thing! I’m a week into a 3-week sprint with documentation tasks on the board for the first time. I’m new to the team, new to the product, and new to the company, but they seem to understand the need for good docs and are eager to help and make this work. I’ve been attending all the planning meetings and demos and scrums, so I am rapidly getting a feel for how things are supposed to work.

The doc tasks are written as individual micro stories that support specific development task/macro stories (rather than include doc time on dev cards). This will allow the dev tasks to be done whether or not I can finish the doc pieces. The biggest challenge for me is updating just the text that applies to the current task, and leave the unknown stuff, well, unknown. I tend to want to “fix” the whole chapter or sometimes even book, when the project is too young to know exactly how everything will work yet.

I think this will work because it is an update to a mature product, there is lots of existing documentation (so I can easily identify, for example, that changes need to go into Chapter 6 or into the Quick Reference or whatever). Toward the end I suspect I’ll need to go off the board to do stuff that isn’t necessarily tied to distinct development tasks, but we’ll see how that works out later.

Comment on Doc tasks in the sprint – for the first time by Patty Blount

Patty Blount — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 14:14:02 +0000

Excellent post and very helpful for me. I’m just getting my feet wet in Agile sprints. My biggest challenge is getting teams to remember to include me in their planning. I often don’t find out about sprints until they’ve got half their code done.

Comment on Talking about Content Strategy at TCUK by Colum McAndrew

Colum McAndrew — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 18:20:58 +0000

I’ll see you there David although I may miss your session as it is immediately after mine and in a different stream. Ho hum!

Comment on Social Media in Technical Communication by Sarah Maddox

Sarah Maddox — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 05:57:05 +0000

Hallo David

Just letting you know that I’ve added your blog post as a reference in the slides of my recent AODC presentation on engaging readers in the documentation. I’ve posted the slides and a summary on my blog:
http://ffeathers.wordpress.com/2010/06/13/aodc-2010-day-2-engaging-your-readers-in-the-documentation/

Just a few days ago I gave a related presentation at the Atlassian Summit conference. I referred to your blog post in that talk too. The slides and video will be posted sometime soon on the Atlassian web site. I’ll blog about it when that happens, so that you can take a look if you’re interested.

Congratulations to you and the other contributors on a great supplement to the ISTC Communicator.

Cheers
Sarah

Comment on Talking about Content Strategy at TCUK by Gordon

Gordon — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 08:24:13 +0000

Looking forward to both presentations on this topic, and I’ll see you there!

Comment on The serious side of social media by Karen

Karen — Fri, 28 May 2010 17:02:30 +0000

And here I was following you for your jokes, David! Seriously, I agree with you. My experience on Twitter has been very constructive and educational. I have learned so much from the people I follow. In fact, I can hardly keep up with all the learning I get here. I have grown to know and respect people, which has led to learning even more. Fun has been there – pictures of cakes, Dilbert cartoons, and so on – but that has enhanced the overall experience. I feel I have made positive and constructive contributions in my job from my networks. This week, I gave a colleague in my new workplace several links. We had talked about an issue, and I said that I had some excellent information to help her. Where did I get that information? From my Twitter network.

Comment on Lies, Death, and PowerPoint by Cecily

Cecily — Thu, 06 May 2010 08:55:27 +0000

This is obviously a hot topic, and one that Slate, has now picked up on. It mentions many of the same articles that you do although its thesis is summed up as “But are bad presentations PowerPoint’s fault, or are they ours? When people write annoying e-mails or make inscrutable spreadsheets, we don’t blame Outlook and Excel; we blame the people.”

It suggests you should only use PowerPoint when “speaking to a large audience, and your topic must benefit from visuals.”

Best of all, it has several video clips of good and bad examples, including Steve Jobs, who “doesn’t pause on any single slide for more than a few seconds, creating something closer to a movie than a slide show” and the hypnotic “Lessig method” (probably quite tricky to pull off).

http://www.slate.com/id/2253050/

Comment on Lies, Death, and PowerPoint by Cecily

Cecily — Tue, 04 May 2010 14:23:22 +0000

All so true.

Have you ever encountered the Ignite presentation format?

Rather than telling people how to design slides, the focus is on paring the presentation down to its essential components. The rules are simple: a 5 minute presentation of 20 slides, automatically moving on every 15 seconds.

Ignite isn’t suitable for all contexts, subjects or audiences, and if you have too many one after the other it can lead to information overload. However, it is a refreshing change and is perhaps less daunting to some would-be presenters than a full half hour.

Maybe a batch of Ignite presentations during one of the TCUK10 sessions would be a worthwhile experiment?

A few links:
http://ignite.oreilly.com/
http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/2008/08/while-i-was-in-portland-oregon-last-month-i-kept-meeting-people-who-raved-about-ignite-whats-ignite-id-say-kind-of-like.html
http://www.slideshare.net/IgnitePhoenix/ignite-presentation-tips-1524584

Comment on Lies, Death, and PowerPoint by David Farbey

David Farbey — Tue, 04 May 2010 10:47:56 +0000

I am grateful to Jose de Souza for pointing out two articles by David Farkas which take a more academic approach to evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of PowerPoint which may be of interest:

http://faculty.washington.edu/farkas/TC510/Farkas-STC-05-UnderstandingPowerPoint.pdf

http://faculty.washington.edu/farkas/FarkasTowardUnderstandingPPT.pdf