Traditionally, software engineers have produced software products and then passed them on to technical writers and other support staff who worked on the information necessary to familiarize the end users with the software. Now, however, market pressures have forced software developers to tailor their products to a specific and well-defined niche market, deliver them in far less time, and with far fewer defects than before. In such a market, neither technical writers nor software engineers can afford the traditional, serial development process. A team of planners, developers, testers, writers, and marketing specialists must cooperate and collaborate in parallel in order to meet these stringent market demands. To succeed, technical writers must follow the lead of their counterparts in companies like IBM and Microsoft and contribute to the development team before the system is delivered. The Information Management in Software Engineering course seeks to enable students to become information managers who not only contribute to the final product by shaping the way it communicates with its audience but also who develop, manage, and disseminate information the team needs to move forward in its process of creating high-quality software. A key element in moving technical writing from the serial-development paradigm to the parallel- cooperative-collaborative paradigm is the equipment we request which allows writers to manage the large volume of information generated by a software team, transform that information into resources for the development team and instructional material for the end user, and to deliver that information far faster than the traditional print technology will allow.
