Fostering Co-development Between Technical Writers and Software Engineers

传统上，软件工程师生产了软件产品，然后将它们传递给技术作家和其他支持人员，他们负责处理使最终用户熟悉软件所需的信息。然而，现在，市场压力迫使软件开发人员将他们的产品定制为特定的、定义良好的利基市场，在更短的时间内交付产品，并且比以前具有更少的缺陷。在这样的市场中，技术作家和软件工程师都负担不起传统的串行开发过程。为了满足这些严格的市场需求，一个由计划人员、开发人员、测试人员、作家和营销专家组成的团队必须并行地合作和协作。为了取得成功，技术作者必须跟随IBM和微软等公司的同行，并在系统交付之前为开发团队做出贡献。软件工程中的信息管理课程旨在使学生成为信息管理者，他们不仅通过塑造与受众沟通的方式为最终产品做出贡献，而且还开发、管理和传播团队在创建高质量软件的过程中前进所需的信息。将技术写作从串行开发范式转移到并行-协作-协作范式的一个关键因素是我们要求的设备，它允许作者管理软件团队生成的大量信息，将这些信息转换为开发团队的资源和最终用户的指导材料，并以比传统印刷技术更快的速度传递这些信息。

Traditionally, software engineers have produced software products and then passed them on to technical writers and other support staff who worked on the information necessary to familiarize the end users with the software. Now, however, market pressures have forced software developers to tailor their products to a specific and well-defined niche market, deliver them in far less time, and with far fewer defects than before. In such a market, neither technical writers nor software engineers can afford the traditional, serial development process. A team of planners, developers, testers, writers, and marketing specialists must cooperate and collaborate in parallel in order to meet these stringent market demands. To succeed, technical writers must follow the lead of their counterparts in companies like IBM and Microsoft and contribute to the development team before the system is delivered. The Information Management in Software Engineering course seeks to enable students to become information managers who not only contribute to the final product by shaping the way it communicates with its audience but also who develop, manage, and disseminate information the team needs to move forward in its process of creating high-quality software. A key element in moving technical writing from the serial-development paradigm to the parallel- cooperative-collaborative paradigm is the equipment we request which allows writers to manage the large volume of information generated by a software team, transform that information into resources for the development team and instructional material for the end user, and to deliver that information far faster than the traditional print technology will allow.