Demystifying the Agile experience...
Most Agile guidelines and training treat all scrum team members as equal co-owners of all aspects of the development process and assume a pure and established Agile environment. Many, arguably most, real world Agile implementations, are less than pure, stable, or ideal. Most require additional considerations for non-development team members such as content developers (technical writers), and to some extent, testers.
I created "Guidelines for Content Development in an Agile Scrum Environment" in an effort to addresses the many unique challenges facing content developers who are transitioning from a traditional waterfall model to Agile. I based the original presentation on my research into Agile Lean, Scrum, and Kanban development methods. I supplemented it with Agile management, Agile scrum team member, and Agile ScumMaster certification training. I balanced my research and training against 12 years experience managing technical content development projects in the high tech industry. Finally, I refined this material over a 2 1/2 year period of real world application with a team of 60+ content developers assigned to scrum teams using development processes that ranged from near textbook Agile to "Agile in Name Only."
I won't pretend these Guidelines contain everything you need to know about content development in all Agile environments, but if your content development team is new to Agile or is moving to Agile in the near future, I'm certain this will help you make the transition.
Best Regards,
Dave Derrick
Certified Agile ScrumMaster
Certified Agile Scrum Product Owner
Senior Project Manager, Technical Documentation, Marketing Communications, & Vendor Relationships