Читать книгу Beginning Software Engineering - Stephens Rod - Страница 27

After you’ve installed some sort of document management system, you may wonder what documents you should put in it. The answer is: everything. Every little tidbit and scrap of intelligence dealing with the project should be recorded for posterity. Every design decision, requirements change, and memo should be tucked away for later use.

If you don’t have all this information, it’s too easy for project meetings to devolve into finger-pointing sessions and blame-game tournaments. Let’s face it; people forget things. (I’m writing Chapter 2 and I’ve already forgotten what Chapter 1 was about.) Not every disagreement has the vehemence of a blood feud between vampires and werewolves, but some can grow that bad if you let them. If you have a good, searchable document database, you can simply find the memo where your customer said that all the monitors had to be pink, pick the specific shade, and move on to discuss more important matters.

Collecting every scrap of relevant information isn’t quite as big a chore as you might think. Most of the information is already available in an electronic form, so you just need to save it. Whenever someone sends an e-mail about the project, save it. Whenever someone makes a change request, save it. If someone creates a new document and doesn’t put it in the document repository, put it there yourself or at least e-mail it to yourself so that there’s a record.

The only types of project activity that aren’t usually easy to record electronically are meetings and phone calls. You can record meetings and phone calls if you want a record of everything (subject to local law), but on most projects you can just type up a quick summary and e-mail it to all the participants. Anyone who disagrees about what was covered in the meeting can send a follow-up e-mail that can also go into the historical documents.

It’s also well worth your effort to thrash through any disagreements as soon as possible, and sending out a meeting summary can help speed that process along. The biggest purpose of documentation is to ensure that everyone is headed in the same direction.