Hard-copy printing

Although heavily used as an unformal distribution channel, hard-copy printing is a feature which is hardly needed at all by internal documentation users: designers and managers. Why? Because on-line distribution is able to replace paper copying in most of the cases.

Paper printing should not be encouraged inside NTC. Why? Of course, we are all concerned by the cost of paper expenses and by destruction of the forests on our planet... But beside, there are other reasons affecting directly SW development process:

Systematic hard-copying internal documents slows down document distribution as well as access and encourages information duplication. The consequences are:

1. weakening of documentation version management: paper copies often bear wrong version information. Most of the time, documents have their own hand-made version number!
2. weakening of document base structure: paper copies don't contain repository information. That makes very difficult or impossible to a reader to access the original of a document. In the worst case, the copy becomes an original and the part of the database is replicated!
3. weakening of document indexing: distribution of internal documents is capital to the SW development process which is very strongly based on documentation. Indexing is not relevant to hard-copies, thus refering to a paper copy of a document is useless!

Ignoring the consequences above will slow down the whole SW development process.

But, needless to say, there are numerous occasions (technical: lack of terminal access, etc., or personal: reading comfort, etc.) where hard-copy printing is really useful, and this feature, at least in a transition time, should nevertheless be implemented. But again, we should repeat that hard-copying should not be the main way to distribute documents, because it is inferior in quality to on-line accessing.