The VTune Profiler Content Cleanup Project

Context:

VTune Profiler is one of the most popular software products from Intel. This product is an industry standard for software performance optimization. The documentation set for this product contains:

• 6 books - Get Started, Installation, User Guide, Cookbook, and two tutorials
• 1200+ pages
• Context-sensitive help configured in the UI

These documents get 1000+ page views every day. In short, this is a massive documentation set. When our writing team launched an effort to clean up stale content across all Intel software documents, the VTune Profiler set was chosen as the pilot participant.

The Work:

The goal for this activity was to reduce stale content by 10% within 12 months. At the start of this time period, the Get Started Guide had already been fully revamped. I focused my efforts on the Cookbook next.

The VTune Profiler Performance Analysis Cookbook is a collection of technical recipes that target common workflow problems and illustrate solutions using this product. Contributions for this document came from several teams, although there was no record of those authors and reviewers. I compiled a massive inventory of these recipes and tracked down their authors. Where folks had moved on to other assignments, I found current team members to take ownership and review the content. Whenever a review was done, I took on the task of updating the sources, editing the content, and publishing the revised version. Over 3 quarters, I removed 100% of obsolete content from this document and updated 96% of the content marked for update.

In parallel, I rewrote the Installation Guide and updated 30 of the most visited topics in the User Guide.

Finally, I picked up the VTune Tutorial. The tutorial existed in two versions for Windows and Linux customers. Several sections of the tutorials needed new results, screenshots, and updated instructions. For the final push, I worked with one of our consulting engineers to reorganize the tutorials for both OS versions.

Result:

At the end of 12 months, I cleaned up 6/6 documents.

The goal was to clean up 10% of stale content. I cleaned up 53%.