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Software Engineers as Technical Writers

Just because software engineers may have a list of deficiencies that make them less than ideal for writing API reference material, this should not be used to dictate where the information resides. They are the subject matter experts. Maintaining information in the source files puts it “in their face” in the hopes that they do update the information as soon as it changes. The process and the working relationship with the technical writer will determine the final quality regardless of where the information physically resides.

Auto-documentation tools require a level of trust that the software engineers are keeping their code comments up to date. If they can’t keep their own code comments up to date, what makes us think that they’ll remember to tell a technical writer?



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Open-Source tools compliments of Voyant Technologies, Inc. and Glenn C. Maxey.
01/13/2003

TP Tools v2-00-0a

# tpt-hug-02