Agile is taking the software world by storm. Its benefits—such as faster release times, closer team collaboration, and continuous user feedback—are hard to beat. Every time I talk with technical communicators at conferences, I have found that more and more of them work at organizations that are starting to adopt the Agile methodology. Yet questions abound. How does working in an Agile environment affect my work? How does working in an Agile environment help me? What will I need to know to get the most benefit from Agile?
I’ve proclaimed for years that information developers must be equal members on their project teams to really provide the most value to those teams and in their organizations. Historically, technical writers have been met with such challenges as lacking access to team members to get information to do our jobs, exclusion of our work efforts from the official project schedule, and demonstrating what all we really can do as content developers.
Agile is one of the best ways to enable writers to meet these challenges and excel. The emphasis on frequent and clear communication in an Agile environment showcases our skills as professional communicators. The planning meetings involved in Agile highlight our work as an important and equally relevant contribution to the project schedule. And the inclusion of writers’ work in the definition of "done" for a user story helps solidify teamwork and increase awareness of what we are doing.
Additionally, working in an Agile environment increases the quality of the content we produce. Since content is produced each sprint alongside coding and testing work, the review and editing takes place within that same sprint. Team members are reviewing smaller parts of documentation during each sprint, so we get more thorough reviews, leading to more technically accurate and higher-quality content.
In my organization, including writers as equal members of Agile project teams has changed our working relationships with our fellow team members for the better. We are involved from the beginning of the project life cycle, we participate in and contribute to design discussions, we include estimates for our work in release and sprint planning meetings, and we help groom the backlog for what goes into the product in the future. Each of these avenues gives us a chance to show what we can do, how we can raise the bar for the team, and how we can make the product better.
This issue of Intercom contains articles that describe different technical communicators’ perspectives of working in an Agile environment. From showing how to develop content in this environment to how our skills can help us take on different roles, the issue explains several possibilities that this new and exciting world gives us. Writers give us tips on learning how to plan in this arena, new ways to think of our deliverables in an Agile world, and ideas for how to build and solidify Agile teams.
Agile helps technical communicators contribute in new ways to products, and reinforces the importance of our current work throughout the release cycle. Showing our value at these various touch points consistently reminds people of who we are and what we can do. We don’t just write documentation. We help teams run more smoothly. We serve as user advocates. We help design products. We solve business problems. And most importantly, Agile helps us make our customers happy.
—Alyssa Fox
