At 05:25 PM 6/29/01 +1000, van de Werken, Matthew (DEM, PH) wrote:
>It's actually worse than that; the boards we do here are in a constant state
>of flux. The only problem is that there are some who think it's ok to work
>on the "current version" of a schematic - so the schematic might be newer
>than the pcb, but will have no relation to what actually exists in hardware.
>What actually exists in hardware sometimes doesn't have a schematic for it
>*at all*. Very, very bad...
Given 100 schematics, I would not expect this job to be completed in a
week, unless they are mostly clean. But in a week you can know which
schematic/pcb combinations are synchronized and which are not. Fixing the
ones that are not, done properly, could take much longer.
For some of the projects, especially where the board has been superceded by
another version and there are no copies of the old version in the field, it
may be best to just wrap it all in a box and stick it away, on the odd
chance that it may be needed. But probably little harm would be done if it
were to simply disappear, so I wouldn't suggest putting in a lot of effort
merely on the abstract principle that cleaned-up documentation is "good."
I'd say, put together what you can and then leave it; if someone needs to
work with that board again, you will have preserved what there is and given
him a running chance. If a project is not clean, it will take X hours to
fix it. If the fact that it is not clean is recorded and obvious, perhaps
with a README.txt in the .ddb, it will take X hours now or X hours later.
Since later may never come, game theory says put it off. Only if re-use is
likely, and you have spare time now, does cleaing it all up make sense.
There is another benefit to cleaning up everything now, however: it will
help the company to put pressure on the engineers to get it right the first
time. "We had to spend XXX hours cleaning up your ****** mess!" If the
engineer in question is the company president, perhaps it would be put
more politely....
There is nothing wrong with having someone routinely responsible for
cleaning up designs and especially with checking them over before they go
to fab. Large companies used to commonly employ people as design checkers,
I did it for a few months on a job shop assignment. Ideally, this person
has a channel back to the engineers and original designers to encourage
them to use practices that make the whole process more efficient. But
having a second person check things is always better than insisting that
one person do it all. If I had two designers here at this office, I'd have
each one check the other's work, rather than having each one spend extra
time going over their own work.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Abdulrahman Lomax
P.O. Box 690
El Verano, CA 95433
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