I contributed as a volunteer to a project to bring digital inclusion to Angolan Students and Universities. The project – Virtoo – is an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software developed as a social project, funded by the maintainer AEE (Associação Educativa Evangélica – Evangelical Educational Association). This software was developed to help Angolan Universities to manage and bring their daily activities to a digital format.
I volunteered to work as an I.T. Business Analyst, documenting the project for users and in a technical aspect for a year. This project was developed with agile, and internally documented with user cases, user stories, and mockups description. To the users, it was developing a guide to all the functions of the software. The team worked in a facility funded by the maintainer of the project. This facility is the Turing Technological Factory and many professionals volunteered their time to make a difference in the Angolan Educational System. Although the project is for a social cause, it isn’t open-source, therefore we all signed contracts and can’t display much of our work as documentarians.
This project was had a singular flow to be documented. We started by setting the functional process flow of the software and all the interactions. Then separating the, in User Cases. Modulating, as ERP is a complete system made by smaller systems. After interviewing the users and spending some days observing the organizational flow of one of the Angolan Universities we created the persona document. The next phase was filled with the design of the mockups and documenting each function in the screen designs. Everything was organized in the Bizagi Workflow. Once the software got into the development phase, the user guides were also elaborated based on the weekly meeting with the stakeholders where we could document all the doubts. The project Virtoo had its final release and on-site training in March 2020.
Being able to go through a whole project, documenting since the planning and until the delivery was a great experience for me. Made me grow as a technical writer and analyst. I was able to overcome many changes needed during the process, work with stakeholders and developers. Accommodating the needs of our Angolan users and offering the developers deeper insight into the project.
