A colleague and friend of mine, Janice Hamrick is an outstanding Technical Information Engineer (aka Tech Writer) and a totally entertaining mystery writer. She attended last year's Keep Agile Austin Conference and wrote up a great piece on it. I'm honored to have her as my first guest blog! @MulticastMatt
When I told a friend I was attending an Agile Austin conference, she asked me if
it was a new exercise program. Naturally, I said it was. Who am I to argue with
someone who is willing to believe that I’m exercising? But for those of you who
know better, the Agile Austin 2012
Conference was a day-long symposium centered on Agile software development.
Three
years ago, I joined Hyperformix as the technical writer for two development
teams. A week later, Matt Roberts (soon to be president of Agile Austin) joined
as manager and led the teams through a transition from an unsatisfactory blend
of waterfall and pseudo-Agile to an extraordinarily successful Agile
development organization. Hyperformix was acquired by CA Technologies a year
later, and CA is going through its own transition to Agile. As I watch the
beginning of this much larger scale Agile transformation, I’m also watching
Technical Information trying to find its rightful place in the mix. Technical
writers often find themselves left out of the Agile process (particularly when
they are not fully integrated into their development teams).
At Agile Austin 2012, the keynote speech by David Hussman
set the tone for the day. He said,
“Agile is as interesting to agility as a guitar is to music. Both are tools.”
He then added, “If you strum a saxophone, it’s not the saxophone’s fault.”
Knowing how to play
the Agile instrument is a matter of experimentation, education, and adaptation.
It can be a bumpy process, but the most important thing is remembering that the
people on your team – including the writers – are like members of a band.
Everyone needs to be invited to the rehearsals, and everyone needs to play the
same song and keep the same beat. Holding
planning meetings and estimating stories and tasks without including writers is
like holding a secret band practice without the guitarist.
As with most conferences, I found the discussions that took
place between sessions at Agile Austin 2012 to be as informative and
interesting as the sessions themselves. I spoke with one writer who said he
didn’t really see the value in retrospectives (the meeting after each sprint in
which an Agile team discusses what worked, what didn’t work, and how to improve
things). I was surprised because these
meetings not only improve processes but they help build trust among team
members. But he then mentioned that his team’s version of a retrospective was
an electronic survey sent out at the end of each sprint. That team is strumming a saxophone, and then
wondering why it doesn’t sound like a guitar.
I’ve also spoken with writers who can’t participate in standups because
they can’t hear properly over the phone or who are assigned documentation tasks
that they can’t possibly complete long after the sprint planning (to which they
weren’t invited) had taken place. It’s no wonder that many writers feel
frustrated by what they believe is “Agile” when in fact it’s not really Agile
at all.
One of the many
benefits of living in a town with an organization like Agile Austin is having such
a terrific resource to assist you when Agile isn’t working for your or when you
think that there must be a better way. Chances are, someone else out there has
been in your position and has a suggestion or two that could help make your
team and your life easier, better, and more agile. If Agile isn’t working for you as a writer,
then it’s not working for your development teams either (whether they know it
or not). It might be time for some guitar lessons.
About the Guest Blogger
Janice Hamrick joined
CA Technologies in 2010 as the Senior Technical Information Engineer for the
Capacity Management suite of products (formerly Hyperformix). Before joining Hyperformix, she spent years writing
documentation for backup and recovery products for a rival company whose three
initials shall remain unnamed. It is a myth that she has worked as a technical
writer in the software industry since dinosaurs roamed the earth, but she does
remember when “agile” was something you had to be to avoid the saber-toothed
tigers.
Outside of work, Janice is the author of the award-winning
Jocelyn Shore mystery series (DEATH ON TOUR and DEATH MAKES THE CUT, Minotaur
Books). She has completed the third
novel in the series which will be published in 2013 and is currently working on
a new and much darker mystery series. Learn
more at www.janicehamrick.com.
