[thelist] Re: A Different POV

[Steve Cook]

I haven't followed this thread, so someone may have already voiced this
opinion.

Another common cause of not documenting is that it is not seen as a
sufficiently important business cost. In many smaller companies, the only
way to stay afloat is to get stuff out the door as quickly as possible. In a
situation where there are only a couple or so coders, having them spend
extra time documenting code is kinda difficult for a typical manager to
justify.

Where I work, I try myself and encourage my 1 other department member to
comment code as much as possible. But we fight a battle all the time, just
to find time to revisit code that contains "workarounds" and improve those,
let alone sit and actually document what we have written.

Of course, one could argue that this is due to poor management, but as the
person responsible for our development efforts I would say that it has more
to do with defensive planning ;-) In an ideal world I would allocate time
for documentation, but it's by no means ideal, so we have to puzzle out old
code instead.

(Hum - read this back to myself and realised I'm feeling a little negative
today. Time to go home methinks!)

.steve

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>
> I am sure that there other types of people who make up this
> group, these
> are just the ones I run into. I also very rarely find anyone
> who writes
> code who likes to perform documentation duties, including
> myself. Designing
<SNIP>