Re: Do you have a Knowledge Officer?
- From: Alistair <alistair@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 04 Oct 2007 13:10:49 -0700
On 3 Oct, 03:36, Robert <n...@xxxxxx> wrote:
On Tue, 02 Oct 2007 12:52:08 -0700, Alistair <alist...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 29 Sep, 21:39, Robert <n...@xxxxxx> 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,
Spot on. Yes. Absolutely. Too true.
but you have no mechanism to assure its
maintenance.
After I came to the conclusion that documentation was important, I
started putting in a factor to the update request quotes purely for
documentation. We had never factored that in to a quote before.
Management sees documentation as a string of change reports.
A string of change reports takes longer to comprehend whereas a single
document takes far less time to comprehend. Time equals money.
In big (F-100)
companies, they DO have a mechanism to assure it is completed for each change.
Perhaps we should have a universal standard throughout all IT
organisations for documentation standards particularly dealing with
maintainance/support requests. Unfortunately, I have only worked in
the real world and have only been exposed to documentation that is
either non-existant, omits by default or merely lies.
The goal is
not a reference for future changes, it is a checklist to avoid errors and omissions in the
current change cycle.
The goal is for documentation that reflects the status/structure of
the system ACCURATELY. (with or without two Rs).
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.
Correct - it should not be a comment. In the real world it is a
comment and the code is still in place.
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.
It does with mine.
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.
You have worked with some people who, clearly, are in need of
psychiatric help.
The fastest way to evaluate programmers is to glance at a page of their code. Any code.
That is subjective.
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?
On a machine that does not have Perl you must first write/instal a
Perl interpreter. How long does that take? Bearing in mind that you
will have to argue your case all the way up to the MD and perhaps
beyong.
Pearl? Wazzat? Does it run on Big Iron?
Sure. When running Linux, it acts like a normal computer. :)- Hide quoted text -
- Show quoted text -
What is Linux? No machine I have worked on ever ran Linux. BTW, I know
what Linux is so no reply required.
.
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