Documentation

Abstract

Documentation has a bad reputation among software developers. Just mention “documentation,” and those of us who were raised on traditional waterfall software project methods remember weighty requirements documents, followed by detailed design documents, followed by lengthy reviews and signoff documents, all before a line of code was written. We recall long meetings, flipping through reams of paper (the poor trees!), and the inevitable loss of enthusiasm for the project before coding even began. If we were lucky, funding (or interest) ran out before we were required to produce technical manuals, end-user manuals, operational manuals, administration manuals, and more at the completion of the coding cycle. No wonder documentation has a bad reputation for many of us aging developers—we wrote more documentation than code. Thank goodness the Agile world has left that voluminous mode of communication behind in favor of Agile documentation.