Wednesday 2 September 2015

Judas Priest Ate My ScrumMaster @ Write The Docs

This is the first of two blog posts I will write about Write The Docs Europe. I'll kick-off by writing about my presentation, but later I will write about my views of the event as a whole.

Background

I spoke at the Write The Docs Unconference in Berlin last year. At the time I talked about how Free Software projects emerge from an idea to success and some of the "laws" they abide by in order to get there. As part of that presentation I wanted to begin my personal journey of better-understanding the "laws" followed by tech writers. The subsequent workshops around this topic produced some interesting results for which the results can be read here.

In Prague I wanted to move from a "pull" to a "push" model and presented some of the laws that apply to software engineers (not just Free Software).

Presentation & Notes

  • Slide 2:
    • I come from the engineering perspective, not the tech writing perspective
    • I am here to learn and to improve my own working practices
  • Slide 3:
    • Sturgeon's Law
    • Really, "10% is where we add value"
  • Slide 4:
    • Management is very important in Free Software
    • See myself as a community manager, but many would not
    • I'm not a cat-herder, I focus more on "classical" management in Free Software
  • Slide 5:
    • Document writers are all just as individual as software engineers
    • Just like engineers, however, they share common problems < something I learned at Write The Docs Berlin
  • Slides 6 - 10:
    • Hopefully, self-explanitory
  • Slide 12:
    • Notice something about these laws of software engineering?
    • The context they were written about is software engineering... but really these laws have nothing to do with software engineering!
  • Slide 13:
    • Lehmann's 5th law: teaches us that all stakeholders in the development process (and this definitely includes tech writers) must continue to master the product for it to remain competitive
  • Slide 15:
    • I love Free Software and Open Source as concepts
    • But the names are engineering biased: "Free Software", "Open Source"
    • As these forms of licensing/development become the norm the terms will become irrelevant
    • When this happens, we must ensure that our focus is on Free/Open products, for which excellent documentation is crucial

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