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John Posada asked:
> So...my question. How many of you take the data from your
> documentation, massage it in a different application than what it was
> authored in, and if you do, what have you found?
I've done this many times, usually in the following situation:
* The same information is presented in multiple places in slightly different
ways.
* One enormous table could hold all of the differences in presentation, with
the addition, deletion, resorting, or transposition of columns.
When this is the case, I make a single master table, from which all the
other tables are proper subsets. I then make the sub-tables and compare them
to the originals, usually both ways, going down the original and checking
the master, and then vice versa. It's amazing what you find when you do
this.
John asks "what have you found?" What I've found is that I can hardly
complain about inaccuracies on the part of others, since I make plenty of
mistakes all by myself.
Which reminds me of a joke. I was once talking to a software engineer who
insisted that his programs never had bugs. "They just make me take them
out," he said, "so it's a waste of time for me to add them in the first
place." While I assured him that I believed him, I think his lie was better
than mine.
Putting material in altered form can be very useful as a proofing or
debugging technique. When I was working at Activision, long ago, I watched a
game designer find an error that had eluded him for days. He had gone over
the assembly-language printout a zillion times. For some reason, he
displayed a disassembly of the same code on the screen for my boss -- as a
visual aid for continued moaning and groaning, I suppose -- and suddenly saw
the problem. He had left a '#' off a MOVA instruction, and was loading a
value from memory when he meant to load a constant. The same code, displayed
in a barely altered form, allowed him to actually see what was really there,
instead of what he thought was there.
Of course, when something is dead in the water like that, it's always
worthwhile to try anything with a good chance of success. Doing this kind of
massaging on spec may not be cost-effective. Still, I often find that nobody
is reviewing my documents, and anything I can do that allows me to see the
document with fresh eyes is probably a good idea. It can be awfully painful,
though.
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