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Title: Bulletproof Documentation: Creating Quality Through Testing by Dorothy L. Cady ISBN: 0-07-009631-7 Publisher: McGraw Hill Text Pub. Date: October, 1995 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $45.00

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)

Rating: 4
Summary: Thought-Provoking, with Far-reaching Consequences
Comment: Very thought-provoking, and extremely well written; this book should still be in print. It has such far-reaching consequences. Cady's central theme is that documents, especially manuals, are no good unless they are accurate.

Big whoop, you say? Well, think how often you buy something with ``some assembly required'', and can't make heads or tails of the instructions? How often have you tried to go somewhere (say, a wedding reception), and found the directions useless? Too often, documentation is prepared sloppily, as an afterthought. That shouldn't be.

Okay, but what's so far-reaching about that? Well, here is an example. As a software engineer, I write programs. (Good) programs contain comments, which explain what's being done. In the spirit of Cady's advice, I started reading my programs but focusing ON THE COMMENTS. Sometimes I would find mistakes in the comments. Much more often, I would find program bugs staring me in the face! The comments state plainly what I'm doing, and the code plainly doesn't do it.

In other words, Cady made me think about things I do every day which provide ``documentation'' to somebody else. A little checking of the documentation can catch all sorts of errors--partly because checking the documentation means that I READ the documentation at least once!

This is an absolute must-read if you care about quality in anything that you do.