Agile got (at least) one thing right: stop writing documents no one’s ever going to read. If you want to honestly assess what will or won’t be read – and therefore what should or shouldn’t be written – you should answer some basic questions.
Category Archives: Articles
Don’t Let HR Block Your Next Technical Writer
First let me clarify – I’ve nothing against HR and their involvement in the hiring process. What I object to very specifically are two habits: letting HR choose who gets interviewed, and letting HR do the first interview and veto some of the candidates before they ever meet the technical writing team leader.
The Doomed Knowledge Transfer: Last Minute, Improvised Show and Tell
Leaving your job and training your replacement? There are four simple rules to effective knowledge transfer: create independence, work together, plan and give yourself the time to do these things. First and foremost: assume that you will not be available to answer any more questions after you leave. Even if you’re staying in the same …
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Lessons I Learned as a Tester, 7: Stop. Think.
In a lot of offices, if you’re not typing or clicking – you’re not working. It’s an odd view for any member of an industry that prides itself on thought and creativity. To analyse a problem, understand it and come up with a creative solution to it, you need to think about it. Thinking, for …
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UX Review: Emergency Measures
If you’re working on a product and have no particular understanding of UX, you can still do a basic UX review to stop the most obvious disasters. This will not be as good as getting a UX expert or experienced UX-QA to review the product, but it will be much better than nothing.
Lessons I Learned as a Tester, 6: The Secret Usefulness of Bad QAs
We’ve all worked with testers who were bad at their job; it was frustrating and felt like a giant waste of time and effort. But hold on to those bad testers: they’re more useful than you think.
Lessons I Learned as a Tester, 5: It’s not a Feature, it’s a Bug: Fixing Bugs Your Users Enjoy
Some bugs, even quite severe ones, can seem to your users like very nice features. Bugs that are likely to reach this status are those that make work smoother at the expense of security (for example, not enforcing part of the permissions mechanism), faster by letting users skip steps that should be mandatory (for example, …
Make Yourself a Better Writer: Treat Every Document Like a Writing Sample
The only way to improve, the internet keeps telling us, is to push yourself past your comfort zone so that you’re always learning new things. Writing day in and day out, however, can mean you start to churn out documents on semi-automatic, settling for your current skill level and never improving. In fact, some of your skills, …
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Glossing Over the UX: Why Do so Many UX Bugs Get Past the QA?
Some bugs are a work of art. Consider a login page I encountered a few weeks ago. Two fields, one Submit button – so far so obvious. But above the button was the text “Do not press Enter to log in; use the Submit button”. I pressed Enter, of course: the page was refreshed and …
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Stump Documents: on Failures to Write Transferable Information
There is a general problem in software, more pronounced in minimalist Agile efforts, of documents that look good at the time of writing, but do a poor job of transferring information. I call these “stump” documents because readers are stumped when they try to learn from them.
