RE: Software User Guide as Specifications Doc - Anyone tried it?
Is it possible for developers to "[sit] down and started programming
one day."
Understand that I'm not a programmer and don't even play one on
TV...but what I mean, assuming that there is more than one developer,
doesn't some type of mimimum planning need to be done, at least so
the developers end up with something compatible? I don't think I've
ever been on a project that didn't have some sort of specifications.
Granted, sometimes they didn't tell me it existed and I had to use
tools to search the shared network drives...but something existed.
Is it true that some projects have no specifications?
I have worked on two projects that did not have formal or informal specifications (initially).
In the first project, the lead programmer had the concept for a rather complex product stored in his cerebral cavity. He would invite programmers into his office, one at a time, and tell them to code a piece of the whole. The programmers had no idea how their pieces interacted with the work being done around them. Then one day, after much fear and anxiety (the lead programmer was in a car accident), he produced a dense, incomprehensible *specification*. But, life went on as before because none of the programmers could understand or correlate their activities to the specification.
In the second project, the team met in a small, airless meeting room discussing the product until everyone understood what their part did within the whole. How it did that was entirely up to the developer. In the first iteration of this project, I sat in on every meeting and wrote notes for myself, which later became the source for my user's guide. When a companion product was considered, we sent the lead programmer into a room by himself to design the product. When he came out, we had a power-point presentation that constituted the whole specification.
Be frightened, be very, very frightened.
In spite of that, I managed to produce user guides. I was about to make other claims, but decided to wait until the dizzy spell ended. <G>
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References:
RE: Software User Guide as Specifications Doc - Anyone tried it?: From: Sean Hower
RE: Software User Guide as Specifications Doc - Anyone tried it?: From: John Posada
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