Agile methodology is a type of project management process, mainly used for software development, where demands and solutions evolve through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams and their customers. However, the methodology can work fine for technical writing as well. Let’s dive in and see how it can improve your technical writing.
Key Points
From the technical writing point of view, here are the key points of agile methodology:
- Documentation should be created in small pieces and produced along with application at the end of every iteration.
- Tech writers track developers’ progress by viewing issue tracker in order to learn what features were added and document them quickly.
- Each team member should have several responsibilities. For example, technical writers don’t only write documentation but also test a product in order to be the link between the outer world and developers.
- All team members are involved to do their best.
Benefits
Agile methodology will be beneficial for an organization as it helps to lower its expenses by producing cost-effective documentation. With agile technical writing, an author often gets early feedback from users, right after each iteration, so improvements are made rapidly.
Documentation in an Agile Development Cycle
As I frequently say, the days when technical writers use Microsoft Word or other static word-processing software for writing documentation are over. Nowadays, technical writers must learn to be adaptive and agile, and the only effective way is to use a help authoring tool. But not all tools are good for agile tech writing. Let’s see what features a HAT should provide to help you keep up to date:
- Reusing content. For example, you need to reuse a topic in different projects. Of course, you can copy-paste the content but it’s inappropriate even if your team is not agile, imagine how much time you’ll spend on this task. A HAT should provide you with features that allow you to do that with just one click.
- Context-sensitive help makes your documentation and product more user-friendly because it helps to see additional information without the need to switch to another web page or app. Again, you can create context help by yourself but some modern HATs can also generate it automatically.
- Publishing content instantly. A HAT should be able to publish separate help topics as soon as they are ready without the need to wait for all topics.
- Single-sourcing. In order not to copy — paste your content to create different outputs for different audiences, single-sourcing possibilities are essential in such situations.
As you can see, agile technical writing is not only about teamwork, but also about good help authoring tool that will allow you to carry out tasks faster. If you’re thinking over what tool can meet all these requirements, I recommend that you have a look at ClickHelp. It has all the features that I mentioned above. You can learn more about the tool here: ClickHelp Overview.
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