Project reports/overviews

[adam83]

Howdo.

Anyone got any good reading on project management on individual it projects?

Need a recap after going through uni into a job where I wasn't required to provide:

* documentation on proposed projects including UML diagrams and pseudo-code
* design/document all aspects of a project - database design, tech spec, etc.
* Test plans, etc

Really want to start documenting my work, from design, implementation to testing and deploying.

Any advice, feedback welcomed.

 

[JIMA]

Hi,

Have you looked at things like SSADM for the analysis + design aspect? Lots of info on the web about this. IMHO just about the most important pieces of documentation are the business requirements. You can figure out what largely undocumented code is doing, but without the business requirements you won't know if it's doing the right thing

O'Reilly publish a very good book on UML, covering pretty much everything in a small volume.

The thing about documentation is knowing what to document. In my mind the business requirements, database design, entity-life histories etc. are vital. When it comes to documenting code I find it's very useful to document the interfaces to classes etc. It's not really necessary to then comment too much of the actual code, just putting in a header comment for each block of code or where something unusual happens is enough.

Too much documentation results in you spending more time keeping the docs up-to-date than any productive work. And out-of-date docs are about the most dangerous thing going!

Hope that's some help.

Jim

 

[adam83]

Pretty much sums up where I was going in my head. lol.

I only ever used SSADM briefly through uni, and vaguely recall switching to Illustrator to make some half arsed relationship diagram which kind of defeated the purpose.

Will defo look into it again.

Thanks for the input.