Well, I seem to have stirred up some communication here. Good for me :)
Of course I overstated my position and I did it to spur the dialog.
Documentation is very important. But it is a management responsibility
and management must be prepared to foot the bill or suffer the
consequences.
Project specs are certainly important. You wouldn't build a house
without some kind of plan in mind and if you are going to get help doing
it, that plan has to be on paper in a precise manner, lest there be
misunderstandings.
What I wrote was really aimed toward repair or enhancement of existing
work. The first time the documentation lies is usually the last time
you trust it.
Over the years I've seen the gamut of situations. There are two that
stick out: One was a project where documentation was never mentioned
until it was time for the client to pay. He used the lack of doc as a
reason for not paying. The other was the project manager who would
insist on looking over your shoulder and making sure that EVERY line of
Assembler code was documented, even at the earliest stages of coding.
Of course that led to this kind of documentation:
L A5,Name : Put Name in Register A5
Which I suppose is good for learning assembler. I worked with one
person who claimed to know assembler. She would write the program in
Fortran and get a machine code pseudo-assembler listing. Then she would
hand-code a new symbolic and pass it through the assembler.
Documentation, like testing, is too important to be left to the
development staff.
HALinNY
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