Re: Scoping a DocumentationProject??

["Gene Kim-Eng" <techwr -at- genek -dot- com>]

My experience has been that there is very little being
developed in either hardware or software that is so
new and unprecedented that there is nothing previous
upon which to base an estimate of effort required to
document.  Even if you're in a startup company that
is crunching away at its very first product, the chances
are that there's some competitor somewhere whose
product and documentation is going to have enough
similarities to your intended product that it can be used
as an example of what you propose to deliver and the
effort required.  Then, after management finishes 
laughing at your estimate of the resources required,
you can start squeezing out of them some idea of what
they're actually willing to invest in time and effort, what 
you can deliver for it and what essentials they can't live
without in the finished documents.  The "scope" of what
the developers intend to create is almost never relevant
to the final document, because you'll almost never get
what you need to document it all.

Gene Kim-Eng



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tony Markos" <ajmarkos -at- yahoo -dot- com>