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Introduction
Years ago when a few of us were minor players in the game, mere technical writers, managers used a rule of thumb to help them determine when to add another tech writer to the team. They came up with the ratio of tech writers to software developers (for companies that developed software applications). The number was 1:10, so for every 10 developers, it was thought that you should have 1 tech writer on the team. Nowadays, with more automation (and some outsourcing) and higher pressure for downsizing, teams have gone with a much different ratio. We would suggest (supported only by anecdote) that the number is closer to 1:20 nowadays, but we would like to establish evidence that would support this claim. If anyone has information regarding this ratio, of content developers to software developers (or content developers to any team of subject matter experts), we would be interested to hear about it. Feel free to edit this topic and add your evidence and conclusions. This topic was begun as an informal discussion between Bill Albing (presently with FarPoint) and Adam Newton (presently with Symantec).Survey Needed
One way we could start to get a handle on this is to survey our readership and see what the existing ratio is. This would not suggest that this ratio should be normative, but it would be a starting place. Then if it changed over time, we could see that.| What do you think? |
Poll
Writer to Developer Ratio
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Prior studies
For comparison, here are some results from prior queries:- How many technical writers should we have in our organisation?
Results of a survey by Cherryleaf, April 2003 - Ratio of writers to developers
Results of survey by STC Suncaost Chapter, March 2006
Factors Affecting the Ratio
There are many factors that affect the ratio.- Amount of products or projects
- Amount of content to develop
- Geographical separation of personnel
- Experience of the personnel
Obsolete Measure
As Mike Uhl told me, "I believe the 20:1 ratio is too high. The technical writer should be qualified and available to assist in writing the product specifications, marketing materials, development process documentation, project plans, and status reports, among other documentation. From my experience, I see it not so much as a matter of writers to developers as much as I see it as a ratio of writers to projects."Some would go even further and argue that the idea of a ratio of one to the other is irrelevant. In the realm of social networking and Web2.0, the developer is the content developer. There is no separation between content developer and software developer.
And this ("the idea of a ratio of one to the other is irrelevant") is exactly my contention. See my comment, below, for details, but essentially I'd prefer to see a correlation between development effort for feature X and documentation effort for the same feature. Is there a ratio of QA:Developers? Or Marketing:Developers? Why do we need Writers:Developers?
-- Added by Rick Sapir
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