Fulfilling documentation requirements within Agile

CHANGE OF DATE = Weds DEC 18th

AgilePhilly will have no speaker or canned presentation for the December meeting.  Rather, it is a meeting of the minds and shared experiences.

We will have a round-table open discussion around the creation of  supporting documentation required for certain industries.  This could be product, CMMI/ISO related,  health care regulatory, financial regulatory, etc. marketplaces.  These kinds of ancillary tasks are often required in software industries, whether using Waterfall or when following an Agile development model.

This topic stemmed from our Experts Panel Q&A during our Philly AgileTour event on October 7th.

Meeting Schedule

• 6:30 to 7:00 Mingle and Eat
• 7:00 to 7:15 To deal with the dilemna of documentation, we will have a central talk from our own Bennet Vallet of Siemens for about 15 minutes  on how to approach your documentation problems.  He was our impromptu expert fielding several questions on Oct 7th Panel in the Cafeteria.
• 7:15 to 8:25  We will then break the meeting into two separate groups, with discussion moderators to keep the ideas flowing.

One group will deal exclusively with regulatory compliance.  Regulatory compliance has implications well beyond documentation, and is best served by a focused discussion.

We will have a second group discuss documentation in a general.   This will have a broader scope, to explore the art of constructing documentation and having a process for documentation.

This will be a free wheeling session where the scope is not limited to any one area, and could devolve into sharing experiences with tools, or sharing views about the process of documentation (bundle it with testing ? ) , or shared duties among team members, or recognizing the skills of a good documentator, whereever the group wants to take the conversation.

For example, one member has a Development Team that doesn’t have regulatory requirements, but does have a large set of product documentation that needs to be updated for each release.  Learning how to be more agile with this responsibility is their goal.

• 8:25 to 8:40 Retrospective of learned and areas to further study and discuss.  And if more meetings around this subject are needed.

So come and contribute your ideas, and collect some ideas of how to approach this often-daunting subject.