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by Laurent Bossavit.
Original Post: Documentation: managing your manager
Feed Title: Incipient(thoughts)
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Feed Description: You're in a maze of twisty little decisions, all alike. You're in a maze of twisty little decisions, all different.
In a newsgroup recently, the question came up: "What to do if my project manager says we're not writing enough documentation ?"
As with many such questions, the issue is less one of documentation per se, and more to do with managing your manager. Here are some tips which have been found to work, depending on the situation, but may well be inapplicable to yours.
Tell your project manager that his/her criticism is too brief to be useful, and not specific enough. Or...
Ask your project manager to write one example document which would satisfy him or her, so that you have at least an implied specification of what
you're supposed to produce. Or...
Look at the list of outstanding defects, if you have one, and for each defect on the list trace it back to the missing page or paragraph of documentation which would have prevented that defect; write that. (If the defect could have been prevented by writing a test case, do that instead.) If you have no defects that can be traced back to missing documentation, don't write more documents than you already do. Or...
Trawl the corporate Intranet for old design documents; cut page-sized bits from these and paste them together behind a cover page to yield a "new" document as large as necessary. Give your project manager those, he/she wasn't going to read them anyway. Or...
Only in the last resort should you inflict bodily harm on the project manager. Like cats, they cannot be trained by negative reinforcement.