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Whats Do You Find Frustrating In A Third Party Script?


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A lack of complete and up-to-date documentation. Even enterprise products like Symfony suffer from it. It seems like with just about every OSS project the lead developer is also the doc writer, so invariably some of the critical, but basic, steps for a new user to use the product correctly are either glossed over or not mentioned at all because of their intimate familiarity with what they're creating. It's incredibly frustrating to follow documentation 100% correctly only for the product to not work or spit out a confusing exception.

  On 11/30/2012 at 9:26 PM, KevinM1 said:

A lack of complete and up-to-date documentation. Even enterprise products like Symfony suffer from it. It seems like with just about every OSS project the lead developer is also the doc writer, so invariably some of the critical, but basic, steps for a new user to use the product correctly are either glossed over or not mentioned at all because of their intimate familiarity with what they're creating. It's incredibly frustrating to follow documentation 100% correctly only for the product to not work or spit out a confusing exception.

+10000

Documentation and/or Online Help that just repeats the field label.

 

Form:

Port Number: ______
Protocol: _____

 

 

Help File:

Port Number: Enter the Port Number

Protocol: Enter the using Protocol

 

(and stupid grammatical errors)

After just finished on working on a third party system forked from OSC, and the Amazon API, I can only agree with the following:

  On 11/30/2012 at 9:26 PM, KevinM1 said:

A lack of complete and up-to-date documentation. Even enterprise products like Symfony suffer from it. It seems like with just about every OSS project the lead developer is also the doc writer, so invariably some of the critical, but basic, steps for a new user to use the product correctly are either glossed over or not mentioned at all because of their intimate familiarity with what they're creating. It's incredibly frustrating to follow documentation 100% correctly only for the product to not work or spit out a confusing exception.

 

It's almost worse to have documentation that gets some of the stuff wrong, but others correct. That way you never know whether or not you can actually trust it, or if you need to just chuck it all into the deepest recesses of /dev/null as you can get.

When you don't have any documentation, you know that what you can observe from the code is always going to be the correct behaviour, at least.

 

But the MS-Help (which I've dubbed it) exemplified by DavidAM above is also a pet-peeve of mine. Unfortunately often found in abundance in most documentations.

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