Re: Do you have a Knowledge Officer?

On Tue, 02 Oct 2007 12:52:08 -0700, Alistair <alistair@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 29 Sep, 21:39, Robert <n...@xxxxxx> wrote:
On Sat, 29 Sep 2007 10:28:24 -0700, Alistair <alist...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Documentation is not maintained; all too often, updates are
completed with no time allotted to update documentation. So knowledge
is not important.

Wrong. Every line of code can be traced back through a Detailed Design and High Level
Design to a Business Requirement. And it can be traced forward through as many levels of
test results all the way to a User Acceptance Test.

I hope that was said with your tongue in your cheek. I can assure you
that many systems that I have worked in did not maintain documentation
after release and, therefore, the only reliable documentation was the
code.

You want documentation to be a single document, but you have no mechanism to assure its
maintenance. Management sees documentation as a string of change reports. In big (F-100)
companies, they DO have a mechanism to assure it is completed for each change. The goal is
not a reference for future changes, it is a checklist to avoid errors and omissions in the
current change cycle.

And where that says things like 'remove after 1984' (in code
being maintained in 1997) or 'I dont know what this does so I left it
in. If you have got this far then you are a braver man than I am'!

It shouldn't be a comment. It should be an IF statement or, better yet, conditional
compilation.

THEY wrote the code. Don't they talk to each other?

IT people are world renowned for their inability to communicate in
clear to any but techies.

That's the stereotype; it doesn't agree with my experience. An estimated 10% of the people
I've worked with were geeks. Generally, they're not as good as they see themselves. The
very best programmers seem normal, not geeky. The only hint is rapid speech, finishing
your sentences for you, and doing things on the computer ten times faster than normal.

The fastest way to evaluate programmers is to glance at a page of their code. Any code.

As for Robert's 4-hour escalation in the knowledge free guru
environment: when I worked on a support team we were held to 30
minutes before being ceremonially dis-embowelled (failure was not
tolerated).

How long does it take to write a PERL script to discard bad transactions?

Pearl? Wazzat? Does it run on Big Iron?

Sure. When running Linux, it acts like a normal computer. :)
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Do you have a Knowledge Officer?
    ... completed with no time allotted to update documentation. ... Every line of code can be traced back through a Detailed Design and High Level ... test results all the way to a User Acceptance Test. ...
    (comp.lang.cobol)
  • RE: Pexpect getting a defuct process
    ... > environment, I can assure you that nothing changed. ... I have no reason to doubt you. ... Checking pexpect's documentation, and re-reading your code I see that you ...
    (comp.lang.python)