And this is maybe the most important point: Software changes over time. It is extremely hard to keep external documents in sync with it.
This is one of the most important points. When you develop, you estimate the effort contemplating the documentation you will have to change. It's basically the same with tests:
Good point, documentation updates need to be planned, otherwise they will probably not happen at all.
But that does not change the fact that they can cause a lot of overhead. A simple feature that is quickly implemented can require many documentation changes in multiple documents. It is far from being trivial to find all the places that need to be modified in natural language documents. Things get worse when you work in a larger team where multiple changes are implemented simultaneously.
There are approaches like ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) that promise to resolve issues like that. But so far I found all ALM systems to be hard to set up and use.
Updating tests is less difficult because a test will tell you that it needs to be updated, simply by failing - assuming that the change is implemented correctly. Unit tests are even less critical because they are closely related to the code that has been modified.
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
We're a place where coders share, stay up-to-date and grow their careers.
This is one of the most important points. When you develop, you estimate the effort contemplating the documentation you will have to change. It's basically the same with tests:
Effort For Feature = Documentation Effort + Implementing Effort + Testing Effort
For every Effort you ignore, troubles will arouse, one way or the other :)
Good point, documentation updates need to be planned, otherwise they will probably not happen at all.
But that does not change the fact that they can cause a lot of overhead. A simple feature that is quickly implemented can require many documentation changes in multiple documents. It is far from being trivial to find all the places that need to be modified in natural language documents. Things get worse when you work in a larger team where multiple changes are implemented simultaneously.
There are approaches like ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) that promise to resolve issues like that. But so far I found all ALM systems to be hard to set up and use.
Updating tests is less difficult because a test will tell you that it needs to be updated, simply by failing - assuming that the change is implemented correctly. Unit tests are even less critical because they are closely related to the code that has been modified.