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
