If only ...

• ... managers were that wise
• ... organizations had documentation standards a contractor could follow
• ... organizations were ... well ... organized enough to store documentation in a sane manner
• ... requirements were clearly documented
• ... requirements didn't do a 180 in the 3 days before production
• ... contracts actually went the length agreed upon (I'm being smacked by this one ...)
• ... a lot of things

It's all well and good to say that, neilwatson. Even if I wanted to provide documentation of the code I'm producing right now, I can't! I never received specs, support, or even time to do it right. I have to lie to my management in order to write tests. In fact, the group that pays my contract isn't even the group I'm writing the code for. And, I don't have a person in the group who's going to own the code to hand over ownership. And, my manager doesn't care! (Well, maybe he cares, but he doesn't see the priority.)

My situation is normal. It's even somewhat expected.

------
We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

The idea is a little like C++ templates, except not quite so brain-meltingly complicated. -- TheDamian, Exegesis 6

Please remember that I'm crufty and crochety. All opinions are purely mine and all code is untested, unless otherwise specified.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.