I am a documentation freak. I do /// style docs by habit whenever I code and until recently I've used NDoc to generate the final output.
Microsoft have been amzingly quiet about documentation. The old doc generator from visual studio sucked and NDoc seemed to have been its far-superior successor so I was waiting eagerly for a version of NDoc that would do generics and all that good stuff. Sadly, I recently read a post that said that the developer of NDoc was giving up because it was obvious that although it was far superior, NDoc couldn't compete against Microsoft's new Sancastle doc generator.
There are two things here that are a real shame. First, NDoc rocks yet the guy never recieved anything like the amount of support he should have. I mean, a 5 buck donation on paypal from everyone who used NDoc would have allowed him to work on the project full time and finish up NDoc 2.0. Did this happen Not on your nellie.
Secondly, not wishing to belittle the Sandcastle effort in anyway but given that Microsoft has a huge fund of cash available, why didn't they just buy NDoc and integrate it into Visual Studio? I guess that would have been too simple.
Anyway, the Sandcastle CTP is out...
Monday, July 31, 2006
Monday, July 24, 2006
How much does a meeting cost?
I've been working for the last few months for a huge company who shall be nameless.
Managers in this company like to call team meetings so that the team can bring the manager up-to-speed on what's going on and how progress is. The typical team meeting will go on for an hour and a half and there will be between nine and twelve people sat around the conference table basically reiterating stuff that could have been said in e-mail in under five minutes.
The main problem is that the managers themselves are non-technical and have more responsibility for administrative tasks than for getting the product out the door. This company prices all its work in man-days and a manager who called todays meeting was recently heard to say that the team had spent 150 man-days this year on project X and "nothing had been done"
Well, apart from the fact that the whole team has moved from C++ to C#, had courses in Windows Forms, changed the development practices from "useless hierarchical" to XP / Scrum and defined a .net application architecture, each person on the team spends more than four hours a week in meetings.
Half a day per person per week means 8 lost man-days per week. On a six month project, this means 200 man-days lost out of a budget of 2000. This also means paying a developer to sit and do nothing but scribble on a jotter for two-thirds of a year.
Managers in this company like to call team meetings so that the team can bring the manager up-to-speed on what's going on and how progress is. The typical team meeting will go on for an hour and a half and there will be between nine and twelve people sat around the conference table basically reiterating stuff that could have been said in e-mail in under five minutes.
The main problem is that the managers themselves are non-technical and have more responsibility for administrative tasks than for getting the product out the door. This company prices all its work in man-days and a manager who called todays meeting was recently heard to say that the team had spent 150 man-days this year on project X and "nothing had been done"
Well, apart from the fact that the whole team has moved from C++ to C#, had courses in Windows Forms, changed the development practices from "useless hierarchical" to XP / Scrum and defined a .net application architecture, each person on the team spends more than four hours a week in meetings.
Half a day per person per week means 8 lost man-days per week. On a six month project, this means 200 man-days lost out of a budget of 2000. This also means paying a developer to sit and do nothing but scribble on a jotter for two-thirds of a year.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)