It’s a few years back, and this contract programmer pilot fish gets the assignment to create software tools for programming an electronics company’s cable set-top boxes — and when the job is done, he’s pretty happy with the result.

“It was as nice a bit of work as I could turn out under the design restrictions, thankyewverymuch,” says fish. “When it was completed, my contract was over, so I stored the copious design docs, business rules, functional spec, high- and low-level design, etc. — none of which were required by their development guidelines — on the development server.

“I also printed a full set and wrote a memorandum describing the entire source code archive, documentation structure and contents, all of which I delivered to my client manager in my exit interview.”

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