How To Approach The Internal Documentation Of Your Software Projects?

How To Approach The Internal Documentation Of Your Software Projects?

Many Software Architects, Developers, and Leads face this question for their projects — whether they should document their projects? If yes, how much? No, we are not talking about the required documentation that almost every software project needs, like the customer-facing documentation. By “internal documentation”, I am talking about technical documentation like Architecture and Design documents. In this post, we will discuss how to approach such internal documentation.

Why Document Your Project?

This is the most important question. Simply put, what is your intent behind documentation? Are you planning to use it as a tool that can help you build more quality software or are you simply putting together some artifacts for the sake of it? And, this is not just a question for the Architects and Designers, but also the entire team. After all, when you are investing time and effort in the documentation, most of the team should benefit from it. Projects that take the approach of using documentation as a tool to build more quality software not only benefit from it, but these have more useful documentation.

Pros of Technical Documentation

The following are some of the common benefits of having technical documentation.

• It helps validate the approach, design, and implementation.
• It can help establish the core concepts and avoid common misunderstandings.
• The same artifact can benefit multiple aspects of the software life cycle. Remember that the same document may be consumed in different ways by different team members. For example, while a developer may look at it for their implementation, a quality assurance team member can use it for writing their test cases.
• It can significantly help in ramping up new team members who join the project later.
• It establishes transparency in sharing information that could benefit the entire team.
• By keeping it up-to-date, it can help avoid redundant communication.