Hello all.

I have a programmer who made a Purchase Order system in VFP 8 for me,
a moderately complex application.
He tells me there is no need to have any written documentation for it,
because the program implicitly has all documentation inside it. Thus
any seasoned VFP programmer who gets access to the source code can
find out all he/she needs to know (in order to amend the program or to
troubleshoot a bug).
Is this true?

Any and all comments are appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Eric Liong

Eric,
I believe that all program documentation should start from the system specification document - does that exist?

While "any seasoned VFP programmer" may be able to figure it out after awhile, the more external documentation there is and the more in-line comments there are, the quick that maintenance programmer will be able to be productive.

At the very least you should have good documentation on all the classes that were used, and whatever framework was used. (Commercial, shareware or in-house developed.)

There are a number of applications around that will generate documentation from a VFP project, anywhere from the included (free) FoxDoc, to the more ambitious products like HTML Help Builder http://www.west-wind.com/wwHelp/.

Rick

"Eric Liong" <eliong (AT) cura (DOT) net> wrote

eliong (AT) cura (DOT) net (Eric Liong) wrote:

Of course, but it is not a useful statement.

It may take ages, but it can be figured out. Certainly, good
documentation can help.

It is easier for the person who programmed it to work with it.
That does not mean it would be easy for anyone else from a dead start.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

Computerese Irregular Verb Conjugation:
I have preferences.
You have biases.
He/She has prejudices.

Thanks to Rick and Gene for their posting.
We had no functional spec, nor program spec in this case, that's the
heart of the problem.

Thanks.
Eric


eliong (AT) cura (DOT) net (Eric Liong) wrote in message news:<5d16ccca.0411041317.baa0408 (AT) posting (DOT) google.com>...