Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Document your program well

As a graduate in Information Technology I get to understand some basic skills that will make lengthy programming easier. One of the mistaken ideas held by many programmers is that the documentation for a program should be written only after the program is ’finished’. This is a very dangerous point of view. It will certainly lead to inadequate documentation and might very well result in an incomplete or incorrect program. Documentation is a continuous process. It starts when we first begin to formulate a clear problem statement and continues as we devise a solution, express the solution algorithmically and code the algorithm as a computer program. Documentation is an inherent part of a program. It is therefore meaningless to assert that documentation should be written after the program is finished.