Documenting "touchy" applications?

Subject: Documenting "touchy" applications?
From: "Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2002 08:53:28 -0500

John Posada reports: <<I have a series of ... scripts that are front ends to
a CRM application; Siebel... these scripts that have been created run well
if you do a series of steps in exactly the right sequence, from exactly the
correct place in Siebel. However, ... there are many views and many flavors
of the same view, many of which you "COULD" launch a script, though it isn't
the place from where the developers designed it to be run.>>

<rant> The majority of procedures follow a certain mandatory order, and if
the users can't be bothered to learn that order, they should expect to fail.
</rant> Okay, I'm feeling better now. <g> The solution could certainly be
through documentation (e.g., "close the application, start it again, and set
the following 2300 custom switches in the following order before running the
script"), but doesn't that defeat the purpose of scripting?

My advice would be to figure out how to tweak the script so that it sets all
those 2300 switches for the user. That means the script works right every
time, no matter where the user is in the program, and that you don't have to
document it. That's a win-win situation for everyone except the developers,
and honestly, aren't they paid to do precisely this kind of work?

--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
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