Re: Is it just me? S/W doc question -- off topic

[Heather Searl <SearlHL -at- SCIEX -dot- COM>]

Ginna Watts <gwatts -at- PIM -dot- BC -dot- CA> said:
> I have a manager who said (really) "The whole point of rapid applic-
> ation development is to get away from rigid specs. Now the developers
> can just add features as they come to mind!"  (Arghhhh....)

This reminds me of a development policy at the same company I mentioned
in my previous message.

There was a policy of giving the developers a "break" when a project was
nearing completion.

This "break" consisted of a day when all of the developers would come to
work and implement whatever features they wanted to add to the software.
 All of these creative, last-minute additions would be in the next few
builds of the software, and several of them would ship with the product.

The documentation department would spend the next few days after one of
these late-project "breaks" running around trying to find out which
features would be kept (and how they actually worked). Then we would
have to decide where to document features such as adding a tilable
bitmap image to the background of the application's window. We were also
responsible for creating things like tilable bitmaps to be used with
this new feature.

Heather Searl
MDS Sciex
searlhl -at- sciex -dot- com

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