Habitual

Skip — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 22:21:00 -0400

I’m consumed by guilt.

Often toward the end of a project I realize that more documentation is needed, and I go through the overwhelming process of writing a bunch en masse. Every time this happens, I find myself thinking “Next time I’m doing this as I go”. Yet next time comes around and I’m in project start mode and it seems silly writing docs when everything is changing rapidly. I’ll wait until things stabilize a bit…

And so I sit again trying to document months of work in a couple of days.

The exact same thing happens with unit testing, and here is where I think I’ve finally discovered a solution. I’ve heard from two different people lately about projects where the programmer wasn’t allowed to check in code without unit tests included. No excuses. And I’ve been told it becomes second nature after a while.

Waiting until ‘things stabilize’ is a fallacy. By the time a project stabilizes you have a pile of documentation to write, and unit tests that aren’t written early probably don’t get written. For my next project I’m starting a class definition with documentation first, moving on to the unit test, and only after those are done writing the actual code. Much like learning to touch type, this is going to be excruciatingly painful at first but in the end I’ll have full (and accurate) documentation and tests.

Handwriting: Tag documentation

Habitual