Development can be incredibly self-focussed. Development managers and developers share information with members of the development team, and can be positively stunned to learn that not everyone has access.

Nowhere is this more obvious than when development is complete.

  • There is a belief that the deadline is available to technical writers, and in my experience, it is not available more than 50% of the time.
  • There is a stronger belief that the availability of a feature to product users is known to everyone once development is complete. That has enormous impact on technical writers because:
    • Technical writers sometimes must wait for confirmation that the product’s functionality is available before taking the step that makes documentation visible to customers.
    • Technical writers sometimes do not have access to the product that users do, and cannot check whether the functionality has been made available.

I sympathize with you if you want to believe, “Well, those are just companies that communicate poorly.” That may be so. But they are still the vast majority of companies, and I lose sympathy with you if you want to argue that they are a minority.

As anyone who has ever experienced Agile software development will tell you, communication that focusses on development-client or development-development has a strong tendency to exclude everyone not part of those groups. And if the company’s values do not consider that testing and user documentation are part of development, that definitely seeps down into developers and those people who manage the developers.

As someone who prefers the title “technical writer,” I am still willing to champion the term “information developer” for anyone in my role who must work in an Agile development environment. It can make the difference between exclusion from and inclusion in Agile meetings.

In my time, I have ensured that if developers did not keep me informed, then I did the work of asking for the latest information. I recommend that all technical writers be pro-active in keeping communication open. Communication defines our jobs, after all.

But I have enormous sympathy for any technical writer who reports that being pro-active keeps being pushed aside in order to deal with the constant stream of new tasks. If you’ve ever worked in food service, you’ll understand the long-term effects on your psyche of there always being someone new with new demands in the queue. The queue is eternal. Closure is a myth.