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Sometimes it feels like there is no planning... and as a consequence also no documentation. Or maybe there are tons of outdated documentation because the projec
by Viliam1234 2y ago
Sometimes it feels like there is no planning... and as a consequence also no documentation. Or maybe there are tons of outdated documentation because the project is so agile that it was redesigned a few dozen times, but instead of updating the original documents and diagrams, the architects always only produced a diff "change this to this", and those diffs are randomly placed in Confluence, most of them as attached Word or PowerPoint documents.
"But developers hate to write documentation" they say. Okay genius, so why don't you hire someone who is not a developer, someone who doesn't spend their entire time sprinting from one Jira task to another, someone who could focus on understanding how the systems work and keeping the documents up to date. It would be enough to have one such person for the entire company; just don't also give them dozen extra roles that would distract them from their main purpose. "Once we hired a person like this, but they were not competent for their job and everyone complained about docs, so we gave up." Yeah, I suspect you hired the cheapest person available, and you probably kept giving them extra tasks that were always higher priority than this. But nice excuse. Okay, back to having no idea how anything works, which is not a problem because our agile developers can still somehow handle it, until they burn out and quit.
- mike_hearn 2y agoWhat you're asking for is not for the company to hire technical writers but reverse engineers. That's a much harder role to hire as the people who have the skills to do it are the same developers who don't want to do it. Ultimately, mature developers just have to write docs. There's no alternative or lifestyle hack managers can come up with.
- Viliam1234 2y ago> What you're asking for is not for the company to hire technical writers but reverse engineers. Definitely not. First, if the architects properly document what they designed, there is no need to reverse engineer it. I don't know how frequent this is, but it's my experience that the architects often don't bother to have a model of the entire system -- they only care about the feature they are designing currently. It is then the developer's job to reverse engineer the entire design by looking at the code. And I would like this to stop.