Chapter 17: Documenting Your Software Project 345 Death (Web hosts)
Chapter 17: Documenting Your Software Project 345 Death by documentation All too often, we tend to think of documentation What went wrong? How did this company fail as an add-on component to a project rather so miserably? than as an actual part of the project. The truth of The company sold the product for two prices. the matter is that documentation can make all The first price gave you only the software media. the difference between whether a project is a The second price (roughly twice as much) gave success or a failure. users the software media and thousands of Time after time, companies have created good pages of bound manuals on how to use it. products and then not invested the necessary Most programmers thought that moving from resources into their documentation. Many of version 3 to version 4 would be an evolutionary these products failed in the marketplace, not move (as opposed to a revolutionary move), and because they were bad products, but because didn t buy the manuals (or couldn t convince people didn t know how to use them. their managers that it was worth paying twice There once was a large software company as much for the product to get the books). (which no longer exists) that used to make a Without the manuals, developers fumbled very good development package. Version 3 of around and couldn t figure out how to do what this company s software was very well liked and they needed to do. Frustrated and angry, develstood a great chance of becoming the dominant opers abandoned the package. development platform in a specific field. Those who did get the manuals were over- Wanting to gain that market domination, the whelmed literally by thousands of pages company put all of its resources into coming spread out through five books that cross- out with version 4 something that would blow referenced one another so much that users had the socks off everything else on the market. The to have all the books open at once in order to company changed the user interface in version figure out how to do what you wanted to do. 4. It changed the options. It changed the calls. Those who spent the extra money also aban- It changed so much about the product that doned the new platform. users could barely tell by looking at version 4 Eventually the platform died; not because it was of the product that it was the same product as not good, but because the documentation killed version 3. it. Properly written documentation, properly In fact, the company had created a develop-packaged with a superb product, could have ment product that was well ahead of its time, propelled the company to a position of envy. and should have moved programming forward When you design your documentation, keep this dramatically. What happened, however, is that tale in the back of your mind and make certain the whole thing backfired and the software was that your products don t fall prey to the same dismissed. Meanwhile, another company came fate. This catastrophe is easy enough to pre- along and released the development software vent, but you must make a conscientious effort that became the de facto standard. to do so.
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