[drkevorkian]

And it seems like a prime example of where a more widespread programming literacy would be beneficial. You don't need any sort of deep CS knowledge to be able to use the superior tools out there, just a foundational literacy.

[mhansen]

What superior tools are you thinking about?

[Herring]

source control, debugging, bug trackers, etc? But they probably don't need the full engineering toolkit..

[bmj]

It's surprising how some non-programmers cannot wrap their heads around source control. I work in a high-regulated environment, so we produce reams of documentation for a project, and various non-technical members of the team must be able to use our bug tracking system (even for so-called spec defects) and version control.

My current project's manager (the "product manager," who isn't necessarily technical) uses source control, but checks in/adds a new file for each revision. We've tried to explain that's what version control does but he just doesn't get it.

[allenp]

Sounds like a pain point - better get to work on subversion for ms office ;)

EDIT: I just realized after I wrote this that Sharepoint has some of this functionality (versioning) but imo is a bear to use.

[bmj]

The word on the street is that we'll be moving to Sharepoint for some document management. I'll be curious to see how that goes.

My group (R&D) has been using a home-grown requirements management system for a few small projects, and ideally we'd move to that for our specs.

[xtho]

Tools that don't have difficulties computing large numbers maybe?