Ruven, Do you have documentation or citations for any of your claims and figures? It would be helpful for motivating our research program. Thanks, Brad A. Myers Professor Human Computer Interaction Institute School of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University 5000 Forbes Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3891 (412) 268-5150 FAX: (412) 268-1266 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam
_____ From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ruven E Brooks Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2007 11:57 AM To: discuss@ppig.org Subject: Re: PPIG discuss: Documentation for large systems [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote on 11/06/2007 10:21:14 AM: > Who will be the reader of these documents? > > If the readers are going to be software developers working on > the source do you think the exercise will be cost effective? > After all, if there are only going to be a few readers and they > are only going to read parts of the source (ie, on an as needed > basis) then you documenting all of it may be more costly. It takes a minimum of six months and, more typically, a year, before developers joining this project have positive productivity, e.g. the value of their efforts exceeds the cost in other people's time to bring them up to speed. From informal discussions, this length of time is typical, or, perhaps, on the speedy side for applications of this size. If you assume that four or five developers on the team are being replaced per year, and that better information could cut the one year learning time down to six months, then we have something like 2.5 person years, every year, to invest in getting and updating the information. The problems with just reading parts of the source, which is what happens now, are that it's often difficult to know where to start and what to read. A large part of the 6-12 month learning period is spend building up enough of understand of the overall structure so that know where to focus detailed understanding. Ruven
