<<Phil Wainewright posted one of the IT commandments today: Thou shalt
document all thy works. This is a perfect followup to my post
yesterday about SOA and data, although it may not appear obvious at
first. Problem: application developers don't use services when they
should; in yesterday's post, I was talking about how they squirrel
away data in their own application-specific silos, but the real issue
is more widespread than that. Wainewright hits it on the head:
Failure to document is thus one of the biggies of ZDNet's IT
Commandments, high up in the mortal sin rankings with the likes of
'Thou shalt not kill'. For if you don't document your work, how is
anyone else supposed to reuse any of it? From your greater sin flows a
multitude of others' lesser transgressions.
In addition to yesterday's more easily defeated arguments that
developers don't use services because the data may not be accurate or
it make take too long, we add this one that's harder to counter: the
developers don't use services because they're not properly documented.
This is often blamed on developers having a "not invented here"
attitude, and wanting to build everything themselves, but I disagree
(in general).
I've been a developer, and I used anything available to me as long as
I understood how to use it, how it worked, and its limitations. In
other words, I used third-party code/services if they were properly
documented, and I could determine from that documentation that they
suited my needs. If they weren't documented and I had to walk through
the code (if that was even available) to figure out how it worked,
then I was more likely to just rewrite it myself, on the basis that if
someone couldn't write proper documentation then maybe they couldn't
write proper code either. Later, when I ran a development team, I made
the developers write the documentation first. They bitched about it,
but we had a high level of code reuse.
There is no way to achieve SOA without reusable services, and there is
no way to achieve reusable services without proper documentation of
those services.>>
You can find this blog on this hard-to-argue-against assertion at:
http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/column2/archives/2006/04/document_docume.php
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