Re: 2167A

[Ken Garlington <73672.2025@COMPUSERVE.COM>]

Fred McCall <merlin@ANNWFN.COM> writes:

<< Not to mention its [DoD-STD-2167A's] insistence on reams of meaningless
verbosity in the way of documentation. >>

Unless, of course, you tailor that documentation to fit your needs. Of course,
everyone knows that if you do NO documentation, you get really low development
costs. (Life cycle costs are a different question, but that always seems to be
somebody else's problem. ;)

It's going to be interesting to see what happens if DoD dumps Dod-STD-2167A
(and DoD-STD-SDD), but insists on an SEI III process (and to a lesser extent
one that incorporates the ISO 9000 series guidebook on software quality).
Humphrey's book implies that there's still plenty of documentation required for
a good project. Of course, he makes explicit things that 2167A assumes you
already know, like the importance of automating documentation as a by-product
of the process, etc.

It's also going to be interesting to see if the Government decides to adopt
another "best commercial practice" - the company that builds the software also
gets to maintain it. If Microsoft had to turn over maintenance of their
products to DoD, what would they cost and what would Microsoft's documentation
look like?

I've seen "best commericial practice" in action. A very large commercial
computer company recently released a product to us that was completely
unusable. After meeting with this company, they've decided to actually hire
someone to test this product before it ships, and to write down the test cases
before they are performed. I certainly can see where "best commercial practice"
is cheap, all right.

BTW, Ada is a commercial standard (and public law), so there isn't a corollary
to the use of DoD-STD-xxxx.