Using Scrum to Manage Documentation Projects

I work with David Chesnut on Team Foundation documentation. Recently, he started blogging within Microsoft about our use of Scrum to manage our documentation development. With his permission, I’ll be cross-posting his internal posts (as appropriate) on this feed [TF UE Scrum (RSS)].

Welcome to the Scrum UE Blog. My name is David Chesnut, and I'm a programmer/writer on the Team Foundation User Education team. Our team is responsible for documenting the Visual Studio Team Foundation product.

Our team has chosen the Scrum process to manage the development of our content. We chose Scrum because of the ability to define shorter term goals, to increase the visibility of each team member's work, and to use empirical data to improve our content development process. As far as I know, this is a unique application of Scrum. I'm not aware of any other UE teams using Scrum as a process for developing content.

We've been using Scrum since October, 2004. But lately I've been thinking that we should capture our experiences in some way. A blog seems like a good way to do this. Furthermore, if we find that Scrum is quite useful to our team, we'll have a way to share information with other teams looking to use Scrum.

If you are interested in Scrum, or project management processes in general, I hope that you find this blog useful.

-davech