Why outlining software?
My decision to use outlining software was somewhat “overdetermined,” as Apple (1986), Bell (1975), and Tuman (1992), have suggested is so often the case with choice of tools. One outliner had been heavily funded by a company I worked for, so I’d tried it out, liked it, and recommended it. My collaborators and I spent some 60% of the entire schedule developing the outline far beyond the initial table of contents, the point at which many teams stop outlining (Allen, Atkinson, Morgan, Moore, & Snow, 1987). We worked together to flesh out the initial table of contents, putting in sections on new features as they arose, removing mention of options no longer part of the product, shifting procedures around as we came to understand them better, re-sequencing the explanations, and moving major sections forward and back. 1) During the first few months, the majority of our time was spent sitting together looking at the computer monitor, swapping the keyboard as one, then the other, got an idea. W
