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I don't think it will fly generally. This legislation probably meets a uniquely
German need. I'll illustrate with an example from my own experience.
I few years ago I was working for a large telecommunications company (which shall
remain nameless but which lost its US monopoly in the mid-1980s <g>) on a wireless
project. Part of the project was being handled in Germany, but the documentation was
being written in the US by a team of which I was a part.
As luck would have it, performance of part of the system was changed from one
release to another. Naturally, for the new release the documentation needed to
change to reflect the change. However, the company, in the way of most companies,
released the hardware/software before the documentation was ready. In fact, the
documentation team only found out about the change when WE were testing the new
release. (It was a telecommunications company, not a communications company.)
I realize this all sounds familiar to anyone who has worked in a software
environment; it's really a common situation. What was a new expeience for me was
sitting in a conference call with a German engineer who was insisting that the
system wasn't functioning properly BECAUSE the documentation said the opposite of
what the newly release system was doing.
I tried and I tried, to the point of yelling, to convince my colleague that the
documentation was wrong, not the system, but he continued to insist that since my
document said A, it must be write. "It is in the manual," he kept repeating. I don't
know if I ever really got through to him that *I* wrote the manual he had in his
hand, and it was now *wrong*. This concept seemed so foreign to him. How could it be
wrong if it was in print?
Well, if that is the general German attitude about the veracity of documentation, I
can understand why they might feel a need to compel documentation and that it
contain certain specific information and that it be correct and understandable in
all specifics. They are a thorough people. Apparently, they both read and believe
the documentation, scary as that thought is.
Do I think it is a wise idea to legislate the existence and content of a User
Manual? No, I don't. But based on the experience I had on the aforementioned
project, I can understand why Germans might feel differently about it.
Tom Murrell
P.S. It is not my intention to slander Germans. This was an actual experience that I
had, and it seems to be to be illustrative in light of the legislation Geoff
mentioned in his initial post.
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