Re: Documents before products

[Richard Polunsky <rpolunsky -at- ALTRANET -dot- COM>]

Sue Heim commented:
>
>John Ahlstrom wrote:
>> A couple of days ago someone wrote a pitiful
>> lament and a wonderful response to the problem
>> it lamented.  Something like:
>>         My boss said I have to have this
>>         thing documented and the code is not
>>         even writtent yet.  When I asked "How?",
>>         he said, "Make reasonable guesses."
>
        >         If I could I would write:
        >         "If you type any key, your computer will
        >         crash.  If you call our technical support,
        >         they will blame Microsoft."
    ...

>Sue:
>I must've tossed out the originator's message without reading it,
>since I don't recall it. But... the paragraph that started "If I
>could I would write..." should have been properly attributed. Someone
>help me out here -- this was not an original by the poster... was it
>a Dilbert saying?

Sue, I have had almost that exact conversation in one of my previous
projects.  There were screens which were almost totally non-functional
but for which documentation had to be written.

The paragraph about writing to blame Microsoft was from an earlier
message in this forum from the gentleman at FERIC (as I recall) who
suggested in jest that the company's unhelpful error messages be
replaced with an alert box announcing a General Protection Fault so that
the customers would call Microsoft instead of the company.

Hope this helps - Richard
>

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