Agile development is an approach to developing products that relies on an iterative process in which each iteration can be as short as a few weeks. The team sets its goals for the iteration, works for the prescribed time, then evaluates where they are, and sets goals for the next iteration. The output of an iteration is a complete piece of the product, including documentation. It's fast paced and not for everyone!

Jennie Abbott is a technical communicator who has worked on agile development teams. She has developed a way to use online help to coordinate the development process. She will describe how, early in the development process, she used RoboHelp to turn the initial development documentation, written by the project lead, into a help file in the product.The project team used the help file to coordinate their work. It served as an internal reference and central repository of information about the product throughout the development cycle. Conditional build tags allowed the information to be available for internal use, yet remain hidden from customer-facing output. Having a help file before there was an application ensured a solid place for documentation in the consciousness of the developers -- and on the team.

Jennie will summarize the best features of this work and show how you can apply the same techniques to your projects.