On Thursday, 20 June, Sarah Maddox presents the live Web seminar Doc Sprints: The Ultimate in Collaborative Document Development from 4:00-5:00 PM EDT (GMT-4). Below is a guest blog post from Sarah talking about the doc sprints.
I’m delighted and privileged to be invited by the STC to present a webinar on doc sprints.
A doc sprint is similar to a book sprint. It’s an event where a group of people get together for a couple of days and write tutorials, or a book, or other forms of documentation. Often there’s coding involved. And always, plenty of fun, making new contacts, and learning new technologies.
My presentation is called Doc Sprints: The Ultimate in Collaborative Document Development. It’s full of information about planning and running a doc sprint, and how doc sprints are useful in developing the documentation our readers need.
Even more exciting: there are a number of stories and tips, gleaned from doc sprinters around the world. Thanks to Anne Gentle, Swapnil Ogale, Ellis Pratt, Katya Stepalina, Andreas Spall, Jay Meissner, and Peter Lubbers, for contributing their ideas!
The presentation covers these topics:
- Introduction to doc sprints, agile environments, and why a doc sprint is a good fit for technical documentation.
- Who to invite, when to start, and how to ensure that the sprint will produce the documents you need.
- How to get the best out of the sprinters.
- Collaborative tools for use during the sprint.
- Sprinting across the world: Handling multiple time zones, early sprinters, late sprinters.
- How to run a retrospective, and why.
- Reviewing and publishing the documents, and writing up the results.
- Other innovative types of sprints for documentation teams.
Please join us online and kick-start your team’s first doc sprint.