Requirement writing

•  "When [condition] the [device] MUST [do something]."

It's surprising how many ways we can get this pattern wrong. This presentation walks through the requirement-writing-guide used by Google Chromebook engineers, and open sourced into The Good Docs Project. It covers:

• Business drivers behind requirements management.
• Writing rules to follow.
• Broader systemic challenges to be faced.

It draws upon engineering standards and best practices.

• Slides (cleaned for public release).
• Video (23 mins).

Open Source awards for Good Docs contributors

Congratulations to Google's Open Source Peer Bonus award winners. Winners from The Good Docs Project include:

Felicity Brand

Felicity Brand has been an incredibly impactful contributor within The Good Docs Project.

• She is one of the project’s founding members, and an active contributor to the Project Steering Committee.
• She regularly comes up with innovative and practical ideas, usually backed by deep background knowledge.
• She is regularly supporting others, focusing on key areas that need help. Most recently she has been playing a lead role developing a Content Strategy, Website Architecture, and development of project blogs.
• When boring but important things need to get done, Felicity is regularly stepping in to help out.
• And her fun, supportive and encouraging style is contagious. It makes those around her want to help.

In Felicity's words:

“I’m very pleased and proud to receive a Google Open Source Peer Bonus award. I was nominated for my contributions to The Good Docs Project where we are creating technical writing templates to help other projects create high-quality documentation. I’m passionate about the work we’re doing there, and have been hanging around the project since its inception in 2019. This is a friendly, inclusive community creating a safe space for folk to dip their toe into open source. We are global, and new folk are always welcome.”

Bryan Klein

Bryan Klein is a technical wizard when it comes to setting up documentation based infrastructure. He has been setting up or advising on much of the infrastructure behind The Good Docs Project, a project developing templates, processes and tools to help developers write great documentation.

• He is one of the main drivers behind a “Doc tools easy button”, a bold initiative to build the toolchain a for a docs website based on templates from The Good Docs Project.
• He is an active contributor to the Project Steering Committee.
• He is fun, supportive, encouraging, is quick to jump in and help others when they get stuck. He is one of the key people behind our unofficial tech-help channel

In Bryan's words:

“I've been actively working on open source projects since my time at NIST with the FDS project starting in 2006. More recently with The Good Docs Project (TGDP) since 2020. It's been a very rewarding experience to contribute to TGDP, with such an amazing diversity of participants, perspectives and interests involved. To be given recognition through the OSPB program was a pleasant and unexpected surprise. While it's not at all what I am participating in the project for, it feels great to have someone else in the project bring my name up for this award. Thank you to TGDP and to Google for this honor.”

Aaron Peters

Aaron Peters has been bringing his project management expertise to The Good Docs Project.

• Aaron has been a long term contributor to the project, and is an active member of our Project Steering Committee (PSC).
• He coordinates our Request of Comment (RFC) update process.
• He has led the development of our baseline development and release process.
• And he has been researching and setting up the supporting tool chains.

All his foundational work is setting up our project to achieve quality at scale.

Serena Jolley

Serena Jolley deserves recognition for generously sharing her deep experience as a User Experience (UX) designer with The Good Docs Project.

• She established a heartbeat in our previously dormant “Chronologue” working group – a group creating a fake project which our documentation templates will create examples for.
• She’s played a vital role creating well-thought out wireframes for the fake project.
• She shares her knowledge with her teammates by being transparent and explaining her methodology, and has specifically mentored a junior UX designer along the way.

Without Serena, this working group wouldn’t have achieved its current momentum.

Ian Nguyen

Ian's been working within our Chronologue working group, which is creating a fake project which our documentation templates will create examples for.

• Ian is the craftsman who has been building the fake product our group wants to document.
• He has been designing and implementing an API to retrieve data for events.
• He has turned wireframes into code, and he has been building a tangible web experience for the Chronologue project.
• Without his creativity and technical aptitude, we would not have a “fake” product to document.

Tina Lüdtke

Tina was ineligible for the Open Source Peer Bonus, as she was hired by Google as an employee. Instead she was awarded a Google Peer Bonus.

Tina has led our “fake example project” makes excellent contributions to the Content Strategy, Blog, and Book Club groups, and is an active contributor to the Project Steering Committee.
Check her post 6 Resources for Starting Your Journey Into Docs.