Planning Smarter: Creating Blueprint-Quality Software Specifications

4.9. Software for Planning

You can't achieve efficient project planning communications without the infrastructure to support you. Your corporate email system won't cut it. Shared folders won't do the job. If you are thinking that you can create some document and spreadsheet templates to organize and manage your blueprint information, think again.

The natural inclination is to use a spreadsheet to manage the Data Dictionary and modules in your project. Unless you write enough spreadsheet macros to qualify as a complete program, these worksheets quickly become cumbersome, if not impossible, to maintain. The task of keeping them in synchronization to ensure internal consistency becomes increasingly difficult. Soon you begin to let portions go, intending ...