Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

There's another category that's missing from most of the (enterprisey) companies I've worked at; procedures. Think of the result of an event storming session; consider all the steps involved in all layers of your application when a user creates a new session, or wants to do X in your application.

Ex: I work in the energy sector at the moment; because their gas/electricity usage varies across the year, there's a system in place where they pay a fixed amount per month, then they pay or get paid back the difference by the end of a contract year.

It's in the energy company's best interest that the monthly amount they pay is on par. The process to adjust this monthly amount is administrative, but in addition to that there's a huge stack of things to deal with across platforms; website, apps, back-end, support, support user interface, etc etc etc.

All the processes involved in just this aspect of the company need to be documented and drawn out as well, because else it has to be figured out from code or various people that happen to have it in their head. That's where a lot of the meeting culture comes from, because there's no one person in charge of this process, and the ones that know enough don't get together to write it down (and then maintain that documentation).



I hit an oddly specific realization this weekend while working on an architectural spec: I make better documentation with a color multipen.

The reason why is because it allows a diagram to support more of the cross-cutting concerns by drawing a red arrow or a green arrow through things instead of a blue one.

It's a big moment in my realizations around technical communication. Like, I already knew this stuff mattered, but it's made more concrete when you can look at a diagram and the holistic whole helps you make more sense of things even if the details aren't right yet.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: