Monday

Collaborate with Other Technical Writers

I meet with Chris and other technical writers from another group to discuss content that describes measurement fundamentals. Currently, this measurement fundamentals text resides in two separate help files that ship with two different software products.

Our primary task today is to determine if there is enough shared text to justify "single sourcing" measurement fundamentals. Single sourcing means using the same content in different documents and sometimes in different formats. We try to single source documents because doing so eliminates duplicated content and effort, thus reducing document maintenance, inconsistencies, and errors.

As we go over the shared content, we notice that most topics are identical, but there are lots of small differences, some product specific, some stylistic. We decide, however, that there is enough overlap to justify sharing the content.

After we determine that, we discuss who is going to own and maintain the content. We also talk about single sourcing tools that we will need to develop. Because I've worked on similar single sourcing projects, I volunteer to explore tools. Another technical writer mentions that we'll need to compare each document closely to resolve differences. By meeting's end, we see that there is still lots of work to be done, but we think it's worth the effort.