Speaker

• Lars Trieloff, COO and co-founder

Brief description

Technical Documentation is a core success factor not only in Open Source software development, but also in other fields of engineering. As in software development, having a proper process in place is key to creating high-quality publications while keeping time constraints. In this talk Lars Trieloff will present how tools and techniques known from Open Source software development can be used to support technical documentation processes and lead to better results, more developer contributions and more satisfied users. The concepts covered in this talk are technical documentation with structured markup languages like DocBook-XML, processes for technical documentation, using version control systems like Subversion for managing technical documentation artifacts, using Wikis for drafting technical documentation and harvesting Wikis for technical information, a piece escpecially important in Open Source software documentation where Wikis are quickly emerging as the most important tool for creating user-contributed documentation and integrating issue tracking software for managing documentation tasks and managing user feedback. Knowing your tools and processes and orchestrating them properly is essential when technical documentation teams move forward to a world that is well-known for members of Open Source projects: World-wide distributed teams with often changing members that need to collaborate more efficiently and more effective. The orchestration of DocBook-XML, a lightweight technical documentation process and the Mindquarry Collaboration Server (MPL-licensed Open Source) consisting of an user-friendly web interface for Subversion, a Wiki and an user-friendly issue tracking system can help achieving this goal.

Additional Information

This talk was originally held at the LinuxTag 2007 in Berlin. Slides are available: Supporting Technical Documentation Processes with Open Source Tools Slides.