1. how important are these things and what are these things (except the user manual which i understand)

Everybody's experiences are unique. In mine, the functional analysis should be developed BEFORE the system is written and is used to ensure that it accurately defines what needs to be done. It is useful (as far as I am concerned) for large projects written over a lengthy period of time by teams of programmers. Once the system is in place, it's main purpose is to provide documentation when support is outsourced. In your case, providing one after the fact serves the purpose of being compliant with the current vogue in standards and some insurance against a bolt of lightning causing total amnesia to the entire staff.

I'm not sure what is meant by program analysis. For me, it's a compendium of the program documentation which briefly describes what each module does, what parameters are expected, and what results are returned. Add in functions called/called by. The worth of something like this increases significantly as the size of the system increases. For smaller ones, I wouldn't bother. For larger systems I think it's useful. I actually updated ours at the last company I worked for when my job was outsourced to India. It didn't matter since the oursourcing company had nobody competent (it was an insurance company and the person taking over support had no insurance background - not a real problem - and no FoxPro experience) to use it.

2. is the consultant just trying to impress my boss

Yes and no. Consultants gear their methodology to where the big money is...large companies with large systems. These recommendations are what they are trained to provide. In your case, however, my guess is that it's overkill by a large margin.



>i hv been a progrmmer for a few years most of it self taught, no fancy college stuff. recently our company hired a consultant and he was surprised that i hv not yet created a
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>functional analysis
>program analysis
>user manual
>
>of the program
>
>and a lot of other stuff,
>
>we only have 5 employees in our company, everyone knows the program inside out.
>
>my question here is
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>1. how important are these things and what are these things (except the user manual which i understand)
>
>2. is the consultant just trying to impress my boss
>
>3. what other documentations are there which are necessary to be done along with the program?
>
>4. where do i get to learn all this stuff?
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>any help is welcome
>
>thanks