Bulltulip work

[tractor]

..

Not only testing suffers.

The SoR and Business Case templates I have been asked to use are so obviously unfit for purpose it makes your eyes bleed. It actually amazes me that managers accept their use unequivocally and then expect them to be de facto. Clearly, someone downloaded them from some uni site in Alabama or somewhere, mandated them and distributed them without even opening them let alone read them. Grrr

[Doggy Styles]

Templates are useful if they make your job easier.

Some certainly do; they prompt you to remember everything, have just the right level of prescription, and make you present information in a standard and helpful way.

Unfortunately most templates aren't designed by people who know how to design templates, and end up fairly crap. I recently had to work with a real horror, and it sounds like many here do as well. (Not the same one, obviously)

And let's not even get into the mis-use of drafting tools to create these abhorations.

[Mich the Tester]

The Joel on software blog gets it spot on with his, now 14 year old, series of articles on writing specs. Painless Functional Specifications - Part 1: Why Bother? - Joel on Software

Write the damn thing to be useful not follow a rigid, obviously ill fitting, template.

Unfortunately the resident CMMi jerk is a believer in rigid, ill fitting templates.

[DieScum]

The Joel on software blog gets it spot on with his, now 14 year old, series of articles on writing specs. Painless Functional Specifications - Part 1: Why Bother? - Joel on Software

Write the damn thing to be useful not follow a rigid, obviously ill fitting, template.

[Mich the Tester]

At my current place I think some of them think all you need is a template and that the content is just an afterthought. Bike shed effect. Any idiot can understand a set of headings, and endlessly debate the, only people doing stuff can provide the actual content.

This is the problem. You see, I don't need a template to write a documet. I went to school and college where I wrote essays of up to 5000 words. I had to structure the content in such a way that the reader would understand what I was saying. I wonder why I bothered.

Templates just get in the way and prevent me saying what I feel the reader really needs to know.

[DieScum]

At my current place I think some of them think all you need is a template and that the content is just an afterthought. Bike shed effect. Any idiot can understand a set of headings, and endlessly debate the, only people doing stuff can provide the actual content.

[Mich the Tester]

At least yours does

Indeed. It baffles me though.

[Zippy]

How does western business make a profit? Is the rest of the world even less efficient?

At least yours does

[Mich the Tester]

My Team Leader has to spend most of his time messing around with the resource system, and trying to shoehorn our work into it. There's only four of us.

We have a situation where managers with secretaries read documents produced by engineers according to some template that assumes nobody went to school, then demand changes to the formatting and the names of test cases. Why not give the secretaries to the engineers to make the documents look nice and let us get on with producing code and tests?

Clientco's directors are apparently concerned with the cost price of the products; well then stop making us waste 75% of our time producing moronic documents!

[Doggy Styles]

My Team Leader has to spend most of his time messing around with the resource system, and trying to shoehorn our work into it. There's only four of us.

[Mich the Tester]

Test Plan sent and awaiting second load of review comments . Oh the wonders of corporate templates and methodologies;

1 hour spent writing content

7 hours spent shoehorning content into crass corporate template

send for review

15 minutes spent correcting content after review

7 hours and 45 minutes spent shoehorning corrected content into crass corporate template

How does western business make a profit? Is the rest of the world even less efficient?