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Subject:RE: New TECHWR-L Poll Question From:david -dot- locke -at- amd -dot- com To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Mon, 21 May 2001 09:59:30 -0500
Bill Swallow asks:
> Or does your company sit on the release for a few months.
The last company I worked for never intended to sit on the release. But, it
took months before the sales people were ready to sell the product.
I have seen where tiered development when done properly does get you to a
point where most of the content is written after the each tier is delivered.
By properly done, I mean that the subset of functionality is complete to the
interface. It won't be stable, because it is going to QA after it is
delivered, so there will be some code changes later, but all of the
delivered functions work. Tiers are supposed to be delivered based on risk,
highest to lowest. So the early stuff will change.
I've worked too many places where the UI was done last. And, most places
deliver the highest risk code last, because it kept slipping.
As far as documenting software that doesn't exist, I'm doing that now. We
have a console, and we have applications that are supposed to invoke console
functionality, but the console is not used by the applications. Somehow I'm
supposed to document the console. So I write it based on the behavior I see
in its UI absent a real plug-in, and get comments back about it being wrong
that do not suggest what is correct. Argh!
Possible, but usually a waste of time is how I see these attempts at
documenting anything before the UI is fixed.
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