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> How do you estimate a documentation project for a complex software system?
One way to estimate:
Take total developer time used and divide by five.
Of course five is a variable. The only study I've seen was some years
back,
in a book by doc folk from one of the 7 in "IBM and the seven dwarves".
Honeywell? Burroughs? GE? They'd measured doc/development ratio in many
companies and got values from three up to nine.
Their shop was the only nine; they attributed it to sensible automation,
e.g. tech writers get copies of all bug reports and tech support email
for products they're responsible for, automatically.
