Can anyone comment on the effect of XP/Agile development on the technical writers producing the user procedural and reference documentation? A programmer pair can make changes in an hour or so that takes the technical writer days or weeks to update in the documentation source.
This typically involves taking new screen shots, updating the reference material supporting those shots, adding new procedures, rewriting, moving content from one chapter to another, etc. Most documentation applications (Word, FrameMaker, etc.) produce binary files which cannot be merged so when major restructuring is required, one writer has to check out and own all the source and destination files to make the changes.
This situation is somewhat eased by using XML-based content management systemts for the doco source, which allow diffing and merging like code, but are not the complete answer.
Most discussion of XP/Agile focusses on developing functionality. But, hey, the on-line help, web interactive help and FAQs, and printed documentation are part of the product too! Do XP projects find themselves moving the release date because too many iterations mean that unfinished documentation is holding up release?