RE: Contractors: Local jobs, out of town recruiters?

[mlist -at- safenet-inc -dot- com]

Combs, Richard [mailto:richard -dot- combs -at- Polycom -dot- com] asserted:
> Kevin wrote: 
> 
> > a) planned and allowed enough time in their schedule that 
> >  real working hardware and software would exist before 
> >  a reasonable documentation schedule began and 
> 
> Is this supposed to be desirable? Or rational? IMHO, if a 
> company waits
> until it has "real working hardware and software" before even 
> _starting_
> a "reasonable documentation schedule," it won't be in 
> business very long
> because either its time-to-market or its documentation will suck. More
> than likely, both. 
> 
> Given such a sorry lack of ability to plan, coordinate, and manage
> multiple tasks in parallel, probably the product will suck, too. 

Well, it certainly _sounded_ authoritative, but I'm not 
actually sure what you are saying here.

Are you saying that there are no companies (that aren't 
on their way out of business) that schedule the real 
discovery and writing for when the prototype hardware 
and the early release-candidate software start to 
arrive?  Physical stuff you can get your mitts on?

Wow.  I had this dream...

I dunno about you, but the documents that I get from 
engineering (some of which are co-written or at least 
edited by me) don't get into the niceties of the 
actual interface, as it will exist. Or, for revisions 
of existing product, there's nothing that specifies 
what the new commands will look like, what the additions 
or changes to old commands will look like, etc.

What we get are requirements that the system should 
have this or that capability or enhancement, and that 
this or that bug/complaint/issue is really important 
and must be addressed. 

Then the developers have a meeting or two and start 
coding. They try stuff out among themselves, to see 
if they're breaking anything obvious or stepping on 
each others' toes. Then a release candidate magically 
appears. I might have had some preliminary framework 
done - mostly stolen from my own work on previous 
related products, but the documentation only really 
starts to flesh out as the testers and I get a whack 
at the early product. For something fairly new, I get 
several weeks. For updates and new releases of existing 
product, I get days.

Later, when the whole lump goes to QA I get a few more 
days to fix things that QA finds wrong with my docs, 
or to document things that QA finds wrong-but-not-
deal-breaking with the product.

I've left out the normal stuff about other concurrent 
and interleaved schedules slipping and knocking each 
other off track and all the negotiation and shoe-horning 
and rationalizing (in both senses...) that goes on.

The upshot is that most of my real work occurs after 
a usable product is in my hands.

Your world differs?

Kevin

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