TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
Documenting software from the source code was my first job as a TW and I more or less followed John Gilger's approach. Most important tools were multi-coloured pens to track BEGIN-ENDs etc. I was documenting 3 level, the lowest being the code itself so that it could be maintained when handed over. We had design specs etc but they tended to be treated as 'overviews' and not hard and fast descriptions of what the code did as we found out on a couple of occasions. One procedure I just couldn't figure out what it did and neither could my boss (and she used to be a programmer) so we called the programmers and were told to ignore it as it was redundant so we did but there were a lot of other procedures called it for a redundant piece of code. Then there was the error checking procedure which set bits in a register depending on error conditions and then printed out error reports. However it did the checking in a loop and printed out the reports when it left the loop. Unfortunately it cleared the register when it left the loop so the software never failed!
I guess what I'm saying is that the only way to do it well is to dig into the code itself.
*** Deva(tm) Tools for Dreamweaver and Deva(tm) Search ***
Build Contents, Indexes, and Search for Web Sites and Help Systems
Available 4/30/01 at http://www.devahelp.com or info -at- devahelp -dot- com
Sponsored by DigiPub Solutions Corp, producers of PDF 2001 Conference East,
June 4-6, Baltimore, MD. Now covering Acrobat 5. Early registration deadline
April 27. http://www.pdfconference.com.
---
You are currently subscribed to techwr-l as: archive -at- raycomm -dot- com
To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-techwr-l-obscured -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com
Send administrative questions to ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com -dot- Visit http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/ for more resources and info.
