Be careful what you ask for. A good technical writer is a joy forever; a bad one, not so much. Clear and lucid prose is good, but only to the extent that it accurately describes the product.
One of my firm convictions is that software testing should include people who don't know how it works. They will test things that you didn't anticipate. They will test your quaint belief that the messages are self documenting, or that the explanations in the help and the manual are adequate. Regression tests are less than a century old; you can't expect every organization to know about them. Likewise code and design reviews. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of Clark Morris [cfmt...@uniserve.com] Sent: Thursday, July 16, 2020 10:12 PM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Application necessities was Re: Still COBOL After All These Years? [Default] On 16 Jul 2020 10:34:40 -0700, in bit.listserv.ibm-main sme...@gmu.edu (Seymour J Metz) wrote: >The claim that COBOL is English like is every bit as bogus as the claim that >rewriting existing COBOL applications in another language will magically fix >problems of underfunding, understaffing and general mismanagement. One thing that could help is changing many shops that are still coding as if it were COBOL 74 (COBOL/VS) even if they are on the latest Enterprise COBOL. > >BTW, when the language du jour is out of fashion, will they want to rewrite >the application again, with the same pretext? And will they ensure that this >time they have adequate documentation and adequate configuration control? And will they have an adequate test mechanism for both online and batch? The hardest part of my job where I worked was getting a coordinated set of test data that I could use as a base. I also have come to the conclusion that the way systems should be developed is the helps and user documentation would come before code and form the specifications for the system. In some of the newer development methodologies, maybe that could be concurrent. All fixes would be either changes to the code to match the help and documentation or the help and documentation to match the code. Technical writers should be a part of the development teams. A large portion of the coding community including me is poor at writing. Clark Morris ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
