Forming Agile/Scrum Teams to Manage DITA Infrastructure and Standards In Your Company
Presentation Abstract
SimpliVity Corporation has adopted Agile/Scrum across its Engineering organization — feature development teams, sustaining teams, and infrastructure teams. The Information Engineering department now manages the following infrastructure functions using Agile/Scrum:
- DITA authoring, editorial, and information architecture standards
b. DITA publishing technologies (tools)
c. DITA publishing integration with other Engineering infrastructure services
d. User assistance design and development
e. Collaborative authoring tools and services (Markdown, Lightweight DITA)
f. Deliverables management
In the absence of industry-wide best practices for managing DITA infrastructure via Agile/Scrum, the Information Engineering team has leveraged general best practices for Agile/Scrum and developed a functional team. The SimpliVity team has learned a lot about approaching the problem and adapting to new requirements. Sharing those experiences (good, bad, and strange) may be of tremendous use to publication teams (DITA and otherwise) expanding their investment in Agile/Scrum.
What can the audience expect to learn?
If companies are successful in implementing Agile/Scrum methodologies to develop features (a.k.a. customer value), they eventually look to Agile/Scrum methodologies to manage their development infrastructures and standards. There a respectable amount of information about using Agile/Scrum to manage test infrastructure, release engineering. operations, and even customer support. There’s little to (actually) nothing about managing publications department infrastructure using Agile/Scrum
We seek to inspire and initiate further conversation by sharing our experiences actually doing it.
Meet the Presenters
Stan Doherty lives in the the Boston area and works as a technical publications manager at SimpliVity Corporation, a networking start-up. He participates as a voting member of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee, serves as secretary for the OASIS DITA Adoption Technical Committee, and supports companies in New England considering DITA. Feel free to contact Stan if you are considering DITA, DITA tools, and DITA-aware CCMSs. Contact: [email protected]
Debbie Femia is the publications infrastructure engineer and API documentation architect at SimpliVity Corporation. She is interested in DITA, tools, and APIs and has worked as a technical writer at several networking, communications, and other technology companies.
