Programmer: At last! I’m done with this program! Ready to deploy! Yeah!
Oops! I don’t want to be a “killjoy” for your celebration for finishing your program. I just want to remind you of this important thing – the program documentation.
In software development cycle, program documentation was there. And the experts didn’t put it there for no important reason at all. If I would be ask on how important is the documentation of the program, I’d say it’s as important as the program itself.
Honestly, making the newbies to understand this thing wasn’t that easy. The same thing that it became so hard to me before. Why? Because at first, we always think that we must be the only who can understand the program that we wrote. Then why should we document it? It’s not being selfish. But like writers, programs are our copyright.
But in real world, things are always different from school days. Even if you have a so much big pride for the code you’ve written, you must make a documentation for it.
In real world, you’re not about to make programs for your own benefit. The company paid you for your ability and for your code. And time will come that other people will read your work.
Based on experience, and most programmer knows that writing your own code is easier than trying to debug the work of others. Because programmers have different styles or techniques on solving different problems. And that’s where the importance of program’s documentation will show.
In a well-developed company, this could be 95% true that they already have a working system. Now, the question is why they still need to hire developers? There would be two reasons for this. First, they need a programmer to maintain their system. And the second reason is they need improvement for their current system. If that would be the situation, can you say to your boss that you’ll write your own program for their system from the scratch? I guess, that would be so impossible unless they want to switch from a desktop-based system to a web-based one.
That’s why we must not take the documentation of a program for granted. And besides, this could be a help for you if you forgot something. We can’t trust our memory at all times, specially on emergency cases. It’s always better to be ready.
I hope that this article make some sense. That’s all for now.
Class Dismiss!
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Documentation is a MUST on all project… But I do confess that I don’t write one :p
Creating a Technical documentation is twice as hard as coding your program. But this will surely save your ass after a few days of not looking on your code. :p
a must…but like what most are doing, after the coding and it runs, documentation is out of our mind. 🙂