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It could also mean that they fall under the other extreme of perpetually outdated over-documentation. IMO the only thing worse than no docs are wrong docs.
by water8 5y ago
It could also mean that they fall under the other extreme of perpetually outdated over-documentation. IMO the only thing worse than no docs are wrong docs.
- jameshart 5y agoWould you say that, perhaps, you value working software over comprehensive documentation?
- water8 5y agoI get a lot less grief from the people who pay the bills this way.
- junon 5y agoI can always read source code. Any programmer worth a damn can. Docs are out of sync with the code the second the code changes in any non-trivial way. However, code always documents how it works (sometimes poorly, of course).
- jameshart 5y agoI'll take that as a yes. So I wonder how you feel about: Individuals and interactions VS processes and tools Customer collaboration VS contract negotiation Responding to change VS following a plan
- junon 5y agoThey're all important. I don't really see the point in chosing one or the other.
- water8 5y agoYou have to pick one or the other when choosing your development strategy. If you focus on customer collaboration, you could end up giving away too many freebee features that should have been feature requests and billed. If you have a design iteration plan, how do you respond to a showstopper that makes the plan infeasible if you are on a strictly waterfall design plan? Each has it's trade offs so you can't always pick one or the other willy-nilly or else you don't have a design strategy at all
- rhodozelia 5y agoThe code I write is going to be used for 20-30 years, and then when the platform is replaced I assume someone will read the code to see what they have to do to get the system working on the new platform. I have documentation for end-users and documentation for maintenance / troubleshooters and zoomed out documentation that explains the problems and approaches taken, and sometimes justifying any tradeoffs. If code is temporary then it might not be worth the effort to document, but my documentation is what everybody except one person 20 years from now sees along with the user interface, so for my application the code doesn’t matter and the documentation matters quite a bit!
- junon 5y agoI was more referring to how the code works and development practices/codebase layout/etc, not end-user documentation.