Adaptive Software Solutions

Photo by  Fleur Treurniet  on  Unsplash In the previous post , I had discussed how to organize the team for creating your software's user manual. With the team ready, the next step is to select the tools. Working with the right technical writing tools is as important in technical writing as it is in building software. The right tools will help you be more organized, productive, and accurate in your work.  In software, we use an IDEs, testing tools, and version control tools to manage our work. In technical writing, at a bare minimum, we use a content authoring tool, an automated grammar checker, and visual tools to assist us in our work.  I'll discuss various tools that are available in the market, link to comparisons, and share my opinion to help you make the right choice. Help Authoring Tools A Help Authoring Tool (HAT) offers several features that go beyond simple word processing software for writing technical documents. HATs s...

Photo by  Helloquence  on  Unsplash This is the third post in a series of five posts on how to plan a user guide. In the first post , I wrote about how to conduct an audience analysis and the second post discussed how to define the overall scope of the manual. Once the overall scope of the user guide is defined, the next step is to coordinate the team that will work on creating the manual. A typical team will consist of the following roles. Many of these roles will be fulfilled by freelancers since they are one-off or intermittent work engagements. At the end of the article, I have provided a list of websites where you can find good freelancers. Creative Artist You'll need to work with a creative artist to design the cover page and any other images for the user guide. Most small to mid-sized companies don't have a dedicated creative artist on their rolls. But that's not a problem. There are several freelancing websites where you can work with great creative ...

Photo by  NordWood Themes  on  Unsplash In the previous post , I described how to do an audience analysis for a user guide. Understanding the audience will help you make design decisions that will serve your users in a better way. Once you have understood what the audience needs, the next step -- and the topic of this post -- is to plan the overall scope of the manual. I have outlined below, a list of sections that most manuals consist of. It's a comprehensive list and it's quite possible that your manual won't need all these sections. This post will also help you decide which sections you need. Cover Page The Cover Page contains the following details: The title of the user guide. A company logo. The version number of the product.  Optionally, the Cover Page can also mention the publish date and a one-line copyright notice. Sometimes, these details are mentioned on the page immediately following the cover page. Legal Notices ...

Creating a User Guide is in many ways similar to building software. Just like software, creating a successful manual also needs prior planning.  Planning a User Guide is a large topic so I’ll write it as a series of eight posts - one for each planning task. Here’s the first post on audience analysis. Audience Analysis A User Guide explains how to install and use the product. An effective User Guide does it in a way that is easy and clear for its readers. It considers the goals and requirements of the users. Therefore, the first planning task is to understand the target audience. The best way to understand your users is to interview them. The interview is done to identify usage patterns and a set of attributes that will help you communicate more effectively with your target audience. You can begin by identifying a few (let’s say five) users and interview them to understand their requirements. If you already have a few pilot or actual customers then it's bes...

Photo Credit: Peter Merholz ( Creative Commons 2.0 SA License ) A user guide is essentially a book-length document containing instructions for installing, using or troubleshooting a hardware or software product. A user guide can be very brief - for example, only 10 or 20 pages or it can be a full-length book of 200 pages or more. -- prismnet.com As engineers, we give a lot of importance to product design, architecture, code quality, and UX. However, when it comes to the user manual, we often only manage to pay lip service. This is not good. A usable manual is as important as usable software because it is the first line of help for the user and the first line of customer service for the organization. Any organization that prides itself on great customer service must have an awesome user manual for the product. In the spirit of listicles - here are at least five reasons why you should have an awesome user manual! Enhance User Satisfaction In my fourteen years as a...

Sometime back I registered for the Functional Programming Principles in Scala , on Coursera. I have been meaning to learn Scala from a while, but have been putting it on the back burner because of other commitments. But  when I saw this course being offered by Martin Odersky, on Coursera , I just had to enroll in it. This course is a 7 week course. I will blog my learning experience and notes here for the next seven weeks (well actually six, since the course started on Sept 18th). The first step was to install the required tools: JDK - Since this is my work machine, I already have a couple of JDK's installed SBT - SBT is the Scala Build Tool. Even though I have not looked into it in detail, it seems like a replacement for Maven. I am sure we will use it for several things, however upto now I only know about two uses for it - to submit assignments (which must be a feature added by the course team), and to start the Scala console. Installed sbt from here , and added the path ...

I am doing some Struts work after a long time. Interestingly it is for a Test Driven Development training. A client wants me to do a hands on session, using Struts 1.x, and EJB's. They also want to do the hands on sessions with a small but production project. It seems their developers are tired of Calculator and Shape projects :-) Well I can't really blame them. I have been planning to create some micro applications around diycomputerscience.com . I hope to create each application using a different technology, so I can have several reference points for teaching. For this session I am going to make a web application which will store and display my slides. I am sure you are thinking ... but why not just use SlideShare ? Well besides the fact that I think this makes a great application that is small, but also production quality. Ideal for using to teach. But there are other reasons as well. It is very hard to embed code snippets on Slideshare. Slideshare also does not support co...

Recently there was a post on PuneTech on mom's re-entering the IT work force after a break. Two of the biggest concerns mentioned were : Coping with vast advances (changes) in the IT landscape Balancing work and family responsibilities Since I have been running a one person company for a good amount of time, I suggested that as an option. In this post I will discuss various aspects of running a one person company. Advantages: You have full control of your time. You can choose to spend as much or as little time as you would like. There is also a good chance that you will be able to decide when you want to spend that time. You get to work on something that you enjoy doing. Tremendous work satisfaction. You have the option of working from home. Disadvantages: It can take a little while for the work to get set, so you may not be able to see revenues for some time. It takes a huge amount of discipline to work without a boss, and without deadlines. You will not get the benefits (insuranc...

This is a simple story of my need to inspect the schema of an HSQLDB database for a participar FOREIGN KEY, and the interesting things I had to do to actually inspect it. I am using an HSQLDB 1.8 database in one of my web applications. The application has been developed using the Play framework , which by default uses JPA and Hibernate . A few days back, I wanted to inspect the schema which Hibernate had created for one of my model objects. I started the HSQLDB database on my local machine, and then started the database manager with the following command java -cp ./hsqldb-1.8.0.7.jar org.hsqldb.util.DatabaseManagerSwing When I tried the view the schema of my table, it showed me the columns and column types on that table, but it did not show me columns were FOREIGN KEYs. Image 1: Table schema as shown by HSQLDB's database manager I decided to search on StackOverflow and find out how I could view the full schema of the table in question. I got a few hints, and they all pointed to ...

I read this article by Bill Pugh on why the double checked locking idiom does not guarantee thread safety in Java Singletons. That article taught me a lot of new things, and to be honest, I had to re-read that article at least a couple of times to partially understand it :-) I recently created a presentation to make at DevCamp on this topic. What follows are my slides and an explanation of each slide. I hope you enjoy this presentation and find it useful. Double checkedlockingjavasingletons View more presentations from parag . slide 1: In this presentation I will discuss the double checked locking idiom, and explain why it does not work to provide thread safety to Java Singletons. I will also talk about how using volatile fields will fix the problem in JDK 1.5 onwards. slide 2 (Singleton): Many of you might already have used the Singleton design pattern . In case you have not, here is a brief description of what Singletons are. The Singleton pattern is used when we want to ensure...

Since my formal education, a lot of advances have taken place in software development. I have been able to keep up with a few with regular reading and practice. But a lot of this learning has been a bit random, and as a result a bit dissipated as well. I feel like I want to engage in continuous learning, in a more organized manner. Over the years there are several core concepts which I have forgotten because I have not been able to use them in my regular work. I feel like relearning those concepts. I think the volume and content of both these can constitute a masters course in Computer Science. But I do not want to go back to school. Not because there is anything wrong with school - I had a great time in grad school. But here's why... I don't want to go back to school because I want to define the courses I want to learn, and not pick up from what's offered. I don't want to go back to school because I want to be able to learn at my own pace, which at times may be slower ...