Before you decide on documentation

Yes,  I was hating documenting ,process ,project management tasks mostly involving maintaining,documenting,uploading,tracking tasks totally annoying.

I can understand the kind of time it is going to take, when you really really want to spend your time working on coding you like, Its a hurdle its bottle neck and lot more than you could possibly express in public forums.

I experienced all of this, but more I saw the other side of the world where documentation,process and methods are not involved and when I had to make changes to the code, Bring in the change and had to ... I realised how important those steps really are in making your/my life easy in the long run.

Now My 20% time roughly goes in doing just that, creating frame works,documentation, process maps and obviously coding. Good thing is when I explain people about possible delays you can avoid while dealing with the clients they are happy, and I am happy because they are happy and they keep me happy.

I recently worked on 2 major brands one is telecom giant in US, with their Interface design and surprised with the lack of standards and documentations for most significant interfaces sitting at the heart of their modules.we had to suggest changes,keep asking questions wasting time in asking and waiting responses while debugging the code,dwell for relevance and finding the problems, resolving them is not here yet ... most of the time is lost in talking and communicating when you or the client have no control and budget for?

Second is a new online retail, who acquired and customised the code for his needs, but when the developer left there is no one to guide talk or support.

On the other hand if we had proper documentation things would have moved much much faster giving more time to Think,Work and Innovate or Improvise.

So Next time thought of avoiding documentation, Probably you need to think again for the poor soal going to handle the application next time which might also include you, because no body remembers the code after 6 months.

Hope it helps, Just wanted to pour my experiences good or bad with you, because wise learn from other's mistakes

Till my next post ...