Thursday

Enter New Feature Documentation Edits

After we write new feature documentation, we send the content to the feature developer and at least one other writer for review. The feature developer and writer review the content for different things. Developers primarily review for technical accuracy and completeness. Other writers review for things like grammatical issues, adherence to the company style guide, usability, and structure. However, many writers also review for technical accuracy, especially writers who have become experts in the product

One of my tasks for today is entering edits for one of my new features. I received comments and edits from the feature developer, a peer reviewer, and my technical communication manager. The feature developer had some questions about how this particular feature interacts with another feature that is also under development, so I need to talk to several other engineers to resolve her questions and make the appropriate changes. The peer reviewer noted some suggestions for restructuring some of the content that I implement to make the help more usable.

Fix Documentation Bugs

One of my responsibilities within the documentation team is to maintain the XML tools that we use to publish content. Last week one of the writers had trouble using one of our tools and wrote a bug report to me so I could look into the issue.

Today I use LabVIEW to debug the problem and find the bug that is causing the issue. We had not run into the issue previously because the writer's file structure was set up a little differently. I updated the tool to take into account different file structures.

Today I work on clearing my list of bug reports. All of our bug reports are assigned a priority to help us identify which bug reports to work on. One of my high priority bug reports has to do with a feature we included in our software last release. The documentation did not explain the feature clearly enough, so now I need to rewrite the existing content. I begin by talking to our product support engineer to see what comments customers have had. We brainstorm different ways to explain the feature and come up with a plan to revamp the content and add more details.