[atribecalledqst]

It's so sad to see how miserable ICDs have gotten. Some of them are just REST APIs and you are on your own to figure out what everything means, it's pathetic. The old ones, you can (and I have) interfaced with stuff from the 80s without any customer input.

(alright, it has happened though that they needed to wheel out the old-timer who was around when the hardware was originally delivered, come integration time - since the way you hook up to the thing isn't always clearly described. But the software was fine!)

[Jtsummers]

Yep. The older the ICD, the better it seems to be. I miss the era of dedicated technical writers, too. We received an "ICD" from a vendor and it's just garbage. It's incomplete, for one, and kind of just ends in the middle of things and leaves out crucial details so we can't use it without reverse engineering their system. A major problem is that it appears their developers are their document writers now, and they just don't do it, either out of laziness or insufficient time (higher priority dev tasks in the queue). They've been publishing the same incomplete document for years.