As winter falls upon us once again, we hosted our last Write the Docs North workshop of the year on Wednesday 28 November. It was held in Manchester, UK.
Overall it was an excellent workshop, emphasising the flourishing Write the Docs community we have here in the north.
We were very excited to have an attendee come all the way from London to check out our workshop. It would be amazing to have more people coming from further afield to join the Write the Docs North community.
Documentation in Agile
The topic was Documentation in Agile, focusing on how we can use Agile practices to improve documentation processes.
We had a mix of experienced technical writers, learning designers, developers, and some who were totally new to the concept of documentation in Agile. Some people were experienced in Scrum, while others were more familiar with Kanban.
Agile has a focus on planning down to the last detail. It’s based around daily stand-ups (scrums) in which individual teams share what they’re working on.
There are usually no more than around ten people per team, although an entire software project may have multiple teams.
Agile key terms
Some of the key terms we learned are:
- Scrum – a flavour of Agile and the name of the short daily meetings
- Story – single piece of functionality (eg social media authentication) to develop in your software
- Milestone – a collection of functionalities, that could comprise a release cycle
- Backlog – collection of stories your team needs to develop
- Backlog refinement – meetings to go over the tasks to complete
- Sprint – a development unit of time, usually around 3 weeks
Agile empowers developers because individual team members can make a real contribution. It’s also tool-agnostic, which means that you can use any tool or programming language and still be working in Agile.
The whole point of Agile is supposed to be flexible, so you can change development direction based on real-time feedback from customers.
Drawbacks of Agile
Some drawbacks of Agile for technical writers is attending so many meetings you don’t have time for documentation. It may also not suit some people who don’t like to plan out their work so much, and feel that this stifles their creativity.
Some people also view Agile as anti-documentation – treating it as an unnecessary box-tick that slows development down. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
Agile emphasises “just-enough” documentation to have a working product, rather than masses of docs for requirements and processes.
Questions that Deborah raised during the session were:
- How can non-developers best slot into Agile teams?
- When should technical writers attend meetings?
- How can you document a feature that doesn’t exist yet?
Practical exercise
The second half of the workshop was a practical exercise. We split into two teams, and each team had to organise their own Agile sprints to develop a client’s social media app.
We had to use the Agile methodology to decide how to prioritise tasks, and split up the entire project into manageable chunks.
Each team member had to weight each story (piece of software functionality) on a scale between 1 and 100, and then share their figure with the rest of the group. We then had to adjust our figures to come up with a shared figure representing the difficulty of the task.
This helped us understand exactly what it might be like to work in an Agile team.
Behind-the-scenes
Overall we had 8 attendees at the workshop, which is the most we’ve ever had. We were kindly hosted by Federation in their event space located in Manchester’s Shudehill. After the workshop, we had an hour’s social over tea and biscuits.
Our presenter was Deborah Barnard and co-organiser of Write the Docs North. Deborah launched our meetup group in Leeds earlier this year, and it has now spread to both Manchester and Bradford.
The focus of every workshop is always an area of documentation. Previously we’ve covered “open source documentation”. Our potential future topics will cover:
- README
- Tutorials
- Reference docs
- Documenting UIs
- In-UI docs (coachmarks etc.)
- What is documentation?
- Images in docs
- API docs
- Intro docs as code
- Style guides
- Video tutorials
Our plan for the future is to keep on growing as much as possible, hosting meetups every month. The likelihood is we will host Write the Docs meetups monthly in Manchester, and every other month alternately in Leeds and Bradford.
We’re always interested in collaborating with more people who want to host a Write the Docs meetup in their city, present a talk at our meetup, or sponsor us with event space/food and drink.
We also want to hear your thoughts on you’d most like to get out of this meetup!
Follow this link to view Deborah’s presentation. Contact me at catherine@awaywithwords.co if you want to get involved 🙂
