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Subject:Engineering specs: The way it spozed to be? From:stevefjong -at- comcast -dot- net To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com Date:Thu, 21 Sep 2006 18:31:42 +0000
(The title is with apologies to James Herndon...)
The VP of engineering at a startup has asked me to help implement the engineering specification process. What a wonderful opportunity to set things up the way they're supposed to be! But the question is: What IS the way things are supposed to be?
This company has a wiki, and it's culturally well established. Engineers are conditioned to put their documents in the wiki. There are only a couple of externally visible documents, done in (bleech!) Word. The next release is whenever the next client signs up. Right now, there's no way to tell if a document on the wiki describes the present, the future, or the past. The daily change log reveals that, as far as I'm concerned, the engineers update documents at random.
Paraphrasing the VP's concern: "I don't expect you to update the end-user documentation every time the engineers make a change. But I don't want them to update a spec every time they make a change, either. What is the triggering mechanism? What changes should be written down, and when? I want you to answer that question."
This is a wide-open situation. I have my own ideas, but I'm interested in the theoretical question too. If you could offer any solution, what would you suggest?
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