What you say is mostly true but perhaps IBM played to a different tune
than what you're familiar with. We certainly employed technical writers
who were technically neither developers nor users but the technical
writers were an integral part of the development team and in on much of
the design and development session meetings going back to the first
stages of development. They were present much of the time and free to
ask questions of things that might not be clear to them in the specs.
As the system test manager part of my testing efforts went toward seeing
that the docs actually told the truth about how the system was intended
to be installed and used... from both an end user's perspective as well
as a device driver and application developer's perspective. My testers
were developers and understood the inside of the system as well as the
outside. We wrote nearly as much code for final system testing as the
rest of the development team did in developing the system. And that
didn't include the unit and function testing and performance measurement
code which was written by other groups.
ps: We had great fun while doing it. The major system test application
for OS/2 was a networked implementation of the Starship Enterprise where
each node in the network was a different function on the ship... the
bridge, the transporter room, the engine room, etc.
Chuck Norcutt
On 1/23/2012 7:33 PM, Moose wrote:
> On 1/23/2012 3:44 PM, Chuck Norcutt wrote:
>> I just re-read your description which doesn't coincide with what I read
>> in the help file about how to do it.
>
> C'mon! You know from experience that the folks who write the Help
> instructions are usually neither coders nor users. And
> the people who should really know, but will never write instructions, aren't
> users and don't always actually know all
> the ways to do something that they have created.
--
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