Merchant Archive

Sure it is, I have seen it done. Prior to the mid 1970's most development was done without significant documentation. The problem was the high rate of development project failure. In the early 70's more than half of all system development projects failed to result in anything going into service. All of the time and money spent was lost.

Success without all the overhead of documentation is possible if the right people are completely available. It doesn't take much distraction, though, for it to crumble into disaster. I know that SOE has some people with that kind of ability from what some have written, and from some of the bio's. But it is discouragingly easy for even the best people to fail, at least partially. Not the best approach in the long run.

I hope that SOE's development process is better than I fear, but their is discouragingly much evidence to keep my fears alive.

The kind of evidence that concerns me is SOE's inability to give answers to simple questions. The kind that should be able to be looked up in seconds with a copy of the documentation in hand. Instead they have come back with answers that are provably wrong in some cases, or outright admitted that they don't know. The best example is the "BE advanced guide" where there are explicit statments to that effect.

[One could claim that those statements were made by players, not devs, due to the extensive use of postings (by the very BE's that were requesting a guide) in producing it. That, however, ignores the fact that SOE did edit the document, did not attribute particular sections to the authors, and published the result under their imprimature. They may have been players' statments that "we don't know" originally, but they made them their own.]

Other fine examples are the armour guide, or the skill tapes information which were seriously wrong on many points in ways that were obvious to a knowledgable player. It is possible that much of this is due to a failure to maintain documentation after changes or discovery of "shippable" bugs. However, if the documents are not maintained as the project develops, that is almost the same as never writing any.

There have also been a number of cases where SOE would have clearly gotten a lot of milage out of revealing some of their plans but did not. "Don't know" statements by TH are common. And other more subtle things others have commented on about the structure of bugs all indicate a weakness in their development process. There are other things that could go wrong that could have caused that, like an accepted lack of accountabilityby programmers to read and follow the specifications.

The upside to this is that the recent team comments by Cinco Barnes specificly refers to writing design documentation! This is at least a hint that they recognize the need.