[Framers] Questions about tech docs in an Agile environment (may be off-topic)

[Pat Christenson]

My company has a very large suite of products and I'm the only tech writer. Software is developed in an agile environment, with some products releasing new features every 2 weeks. The largest product updates quarterly. I can easily spend almost a month on its release notes. We are using FrameMaker and publishing as a PDF.

In addition to keeping up with release notes (which are very detailed, if I didn't mention that), I'm supposed to be writing user & admin guides for the sub-products. The ones we have are hopelessly out-of-date.

With all this going on, by the time I finish a user guide, it is soon out-of-date and there just isn't time to transfer material from release notes to the user guide, repaginate, etc. and post it.

My team director and I are trying to come up with a more efficient way of getting this information to the user in a timely way and write much, much shorter release notes.

At this point, we're leaning towards the following:

  1.  Instead of long, detailed user guides, write shorter QuickStart guides, covering the basics. Once the user has absorbed this, they can go to the product's searchable Help to find info on a specific topic. (No one reads a 75+ page user guide, right? They read enough to get started and then search for info as they need it.)
  2.  Make release notes very brief-one or two sentences describing a new/enhanced feature and a couple of keywords so they can search the product help for the details.

Although several of our products have very basic Help, there is nothing in place like we're thinking of.

So long story short:


  *   Are you producing timely documentation within an agile software development environment? If so, how and is it working well?
  *   Is anyone doing something like what we're thinking of?
  *   What are your recommendations for tools? FrameMaker-to-Robohelp? Give up on Frame and write in Robohelp? Something else?
  *   Can you quickly add new material (topics & steps) to an existing Help system?

I developed a couple of Help systems years ago, using FrameMaker and Webworks. I'm not sure if that qualifies me as a newbie since so much time has gone by.

I will appreciate ALL your recommendations, whether sent to me privately or posted on the list.

P.S. Please don't recommend structure. There's no way we're going down that road for only one tech writer.

Pat Christenson