Re: Documentation development processes.

[Pat Costello <Patrick Costello ireland sun com>]

Hi Dan, 

Thanks for your reply to my mail about documentation development processes, you 
made the following points about the back-end of the process, my response is 
arrowed below: 

"I'm not sure I understand the difference between the Quality Review and
Approval Review.  I thought I was being somewhat bold in adding the
different editorial roles, indexing role, and QA role.  I certainly would
not be against a quality/approval review if I thought we could pull it
off.  As Pat stated, it really comes down to resources.

So, if we have the resources to do this, it would be great.  However, we
may want to ease into this.  I would suggest we *not* add this step to the
process until we have people filling the other editorial roles.  If we
find editors very easily, or somebody is really dying to do this review,
then we can surely add this step.

The other concern is turn-around time.  Each step we take draws out the
time between when the application freezes and when the application
ships.  We have to be sure that we can get through the whole process in a
reasonable time frame so the application doesn't sit mothballed for 6
months between being developed and finally being released.  In order to
get fast turnaround times, we need to have a lot of people working in
parallel.  This may be possible, but we will need to ramp up to this
slowly as we accumulate more contributors and refine our process."

>>
Baldly put, the quality reviewer ensures documentation quality and consistency, 
whereas the approval reviewers sign-off on their own particular fields. For 
example the technical reviewer signs off on the technical content of the final 
document, the editor signs off on the editorial accuracy, the usability reviewer 
signs off on usability and the quality reviewer signs off on the overall 
quality. The purpose of the approval review is to establish an acceptance 
threshold so that there is a guarantee that all documentation released has met 
agreed standards. 

The time the process takes is primarily dependent on the size of the job, and 
secondarily dependent on how well the writer and the information design reviewer 
do their jobs. If the work is done to a high standard upfront then the work of 
the editor and the approval reviewers is minimized, and thus the time is kept to 
a minimum. 

Notwithstanding time pressures, I do believe that we need to instigate 
acceptance criteria to achieve credible and consistent quality standards. This 
is in everybody's interest. 
>> 

Best, 

Pat