Quote Originally Posted by Gregoshi
... "The code is self-documenting." Yeah, right.
Lol, yes indeed. That one's classic.

Generally speaking, public sector software development is a bit different that private. The software life cycle in the private industry is often much shorter (overall life cycle, not development life cycle). We had huge critical systems coded in COBOL that were originally developed in the early 70s, still in production in the late 90s (all of California's unemployment check processing, for example). Because of the multitude of costly nightmares arising from a lack of documentation of such systems, the public sector--at least where I worked--is pretty strict about documentation. In private industry though, say for developing games and such, deadline is everything, and as the code won't usually be maintained for much more than 2-4 years, I can see why documentation would not be a very high priority in a crunch (much to the dismay of any maintenance or evolutionary programmers later on ...).

A few annoying programmers (new systems developers) have this attitude: well, I'm not going to be around to have to maintain it so what do I care? I found this to be really annoying (so I made their lazy arses polish the documentation with a toothbrush). The overall cost of a system escalates considerably over its life cycle when it takes days instead of hours, or weeks instead of days, to make a minor processing change to an existing system (e.g. legislation changes laws and processes constantly, necessitating frequent changes in the systems that support those laws and processes). When you take into account all of the regression testing that must take place (dependencies on and obligations to other systems, etc.), good documentation is really, really important. In the long run (in public sector work) missing the deadline is far less costly to the taxpayer than shortchanging the documentation. Of course, the REAL issue is--missing the deadline doesn't make the politicians in charge look good and that's what really drives the wagon--right into the mud, often enough.

Gah ... nasty flashbacks. Why am I even talking about this? Time for bed ... .