Content Management with "Delta"

It is the time to summarize my current assignment before leaving for the next. In the past one and half years, I spent time and effort to implement a "delta approach" to manage content in Agile development environment, of course with the help from PMs, SMEs and program managers.

 

To develop content in Agile environment is not that simple. Technical writer acts not only as information developer with quick hand and tight colaboration with engineers, but also as partial configuration manager to map the information to different design or maintenance branches. In my project, the branch strategy is rather complicated and it becomes common scene that several projects simultaneously running on different branches, each to be merged back to the main branch at certain points for external release. The company's information discipline releases official tools for handling such cases on single document with conditional text, however most projects I know give that up after one or two projects' trial. The reason is clear, the conditional text can be changed over different projects and thus cannot be easily maintained among different writers, not to mention writers on remote site.

 

I make it through with another approach: a separate document recording only the "delta" change. Information review and inspection are made on delta, and once the information passes review, it is merged to baseline documents. Up to now the method is running smoothly on my project because I am the only writer working on the product, the one drafted the information development, maintenance and mapping guidelines, and the one knows the information mapping better than anybody else in the group. The confusion could be there at the beginning and requires tuning to adjust to project's specific needs.

 

Honestly, this method sounds not that "smart" and it does bring extra workload for technical writer doing delta merge. However, since the documentation effort spent in Agile development environment is rather "lightweight" than traditional "waterfall", the delta document in my project consequently becomes the input for release note or delivery report and thus save the project workload handling project release.