My Personal Tech-Writing Agile Manifesto
von Mikey Ariel (Red Hat, Inc.)
ag·ile
adjective \ˈa-jəl, -ˌjī(-ə)l\
1. marked by ready ability to move with quick easy grace <an agile dancer>
2. having a quick resourceful and adaptable character <an agile mind>
(Merriam-Webster dictionary)
When the Agile Manifesto was first presented to the geeksphere, many thought it was the hottest thing since striped RAID. Since then, agile software development has morphed, evolved, branched out, and yes - been abused.
We seem to have gotten so caught up in semantics and bureaucracy that we've forgotten about the true meaning of the word “agile”. A Kanban board will not magically make your company agile, and opening the scheduling dam to a flood of meetings is the best way to burn out your team. Nowadays, many employees and companies have all but written off agile methodologies as ”empty buzz words” and shudder at the mere thought of a sprint.
So what *does* make agile methodologies work, and how can I make them work for me? How can I build my own personal, portable Agile Manifesto, that I can apply to any working environment at any company? And what does all of this have to do with technical writing anyway?
(Mikey Ariel is a senior technical writer at Red Hat, with writing experience in waterfall and agile environments. As luck (or misfortune) would have it, she also trained and worked as a scrum master long enough to form a semi-educated philosophy about life, the universe, and stand-up meetings.)
Ãber den Autor Mikey Ariel:
Worked as a technical writer for over 5 years in various enterprise software companies before discovering the open source world and joining Red Hat in October 2013.
Former agile scrum master in a SAFe environment, current Documentarian community advocate, and generally passionate about the words we share with the world.