Wednesday, May 19, 2004
Updating documentation - how to make life harder
Monday and Tuesday have been a little pedestrian. I have inherited from a colleague the task of making some documentation updates. Unfortunately, rather than logging the individual "defects" in the appropriate database, they've been logged in a spreadsheet. In fact they've been logged in several spreadsheets, some of which really should be subsets of other, master, spreadsheets.
Of course, the changes themselves involve more than one file. The result is that, rather than making one change and then updating one log record, I finish up updating between 1 and 3 files and updating log records in 3 places.
Hmm, I think we would have been better to think a little longer about how
this was going to be managed. However, there are relatively few updates, so I'm going to fix things as they are, and then try and introduce a better way later.
At least I made a start on the report.
Of course, the changes themselves involve more than one file. The result is that, rather than making one change and then updating one log record, I finish up updating between 1 and 3 files and updating log records in 3 places.
Hmm, I think we would have been better to think a little longer about how
this was going to be managed. However, there are relatively few updates, so I'm going to fix things as they are, and then try and introduce a better way later.
At least I made a start on the report.
# posted by tom_gillies @ 12:02 PM 
