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One of the big challenges in today's complex environment is getting software done in some close relation to the schedule. I refer to projects with multiple programmers and a team leader or project manager. Of course, there are a number of planning tools, and project management software has long been available. But there are two …

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  1. Simon Turner

    WTF?

    Am I the only one who has no idea what the hell Bill is talking about?

    "The Virtual Chapter is usually one “chapter” per programmer in the virtual project book "

    sorry the what?

    "where he/she keeps notes on each External Entry Point (EEP) used by other programmers"

    um, ok, think I get this one, though identifying such may be non-obvious

    "It is simply a text file that can be directly copied from the current code"

    What, so it's already in the code? You mean it's first written as (special) comments in the code? So each update to the virtual project book (whatever that is) involves finding and copying each comment relevant to that (as opposed to all the other comments in the code base)? Sounds like a horrible error-prone faff to me.

    "identified by virtual chapter number"

    Which would be determined by what?.

    Can someone please explain this to me in words a poor developer can understand?

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  2. Simon Parmenter

    A bigger challenge

    "One of the big challenges in today's complex environment is getting software done in some close relation to the schedule."

    A bigger challenge is to estimate the effort required to achieve a goal to a reasonable degree. The assumption in the above quote is that the schedule, which is an estimate, is the independent variable and that the actual required effort, 'getting the software done', is the dependent variable.

    In a majority of reports and surveys addressing the issue of unsuccessful IT projects, a significant factor was the unrealistic estimates given.

    As you you say, just knowing where a problem is, is half of the battle. Getting to grips with estimating required effort and resources is a major strategical objective in the project planning war.

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  3. John Werner

    I'm missing something here....

    I'm not sure how a Virtual Chapter (which seems just like good documentation practice) helps track a project. It might generate documentation on interfaces, but I have found using tools like Doxygen on well documented code to be a much better alternative.

    BTW, the real problem is getting the developer to document stuff that so others can understand. Comments are supposed to be for others to know what you did, not just for you to remember when you look at it tomorrow!

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  4. Csharpsnwboarder

    RE: WTF

    This tool is used to compile each individual programmers notes for his/her part of the project. Each programmers part is a chapter in a book just means that an individuals comments are kept together, rather than spread over an entire piece of documentation. Speaking on the Determined by chapter number is just a reference to which "chapter" the programmer writes in. For example, using:

    ///176 **place your virtual chapter comments here ** 176 ///

    This allows the programmer to go through his code using a find or search function to pull specified comments out. The reasoning behind the chapter number is to simply allow one programmer to pull only his comments out, and not those made by a coder with the chapter number 188.

    Hope this makes some sense for you. I would say that it seems a bit complicated, but whatever helps the dev team keep docs organized.

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  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Re: WTF?

    John Werner beat me to it, but I was going to say doxygen too. I'll go a little further and point out that doxygen lets you define custom command via alias definitions. This lets you write comments like this (C code):

    // \chapter Blah blah blah...

    You make doxygen run as part of your overnight build script, and the resulting output (under Windows) can be a compiled help file with all the \chapter comments pulled together into a single window. So you can implement the 'virtual chapters' via doxygen aliases.

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  6. John

    cvs??

    I thought that this problem was solved years ago with CVS

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