How to Make Technical Documentation Work in Your Organization

When it comes to IT and software development, proper and comprehensive technical documentation is a necessary ingredient for protecting the intangible assets of any technology organization. Yet, as necessary as it is, for many software development shops, good documentation is hard to produce and harder to maintain. Many organizations want to have the benefit of a well documented technical infrastructure, but are at a loss about to how to make it happen.

Surprisingly the remedy is not that hard. Making technical documentation work for your organization is possible and in many cases can be surprisingly easy.

 In this talk, Bob Reselman shares the techniques that he has developed in his twenty plus years of helping organizations implement an effective technical documentation infrastructure that is easy to use and easy to maintain.

Key themes covered in this talk are:

• Useful documentation is much more than nice text and pictures
• Separate semantics from syntax, concepts from procedure
• When it comes to content creation, 1 developer will always do better than 3 technical writers.
• Follow the 7 Rules

About the Presenter:

Bob Reselman is a noted technical writer, editor and software developer. For many years Bob helped Edmunds.com create and maintain a comprehensive, highly discoverable documentation infrastructure that supports text, graphics and video. He has written numerous articles on and about software development and technical document for online publications such as InformIT, DevX, Developer.com and DevSource. Over the course of his career, Bob has held many technology positions in large and small companies. He was Platform Architect for the computer manufacturer, Gateway, and was a Principal Consultant for the transnational consulting company, Cap Gemini.