Hey all, I’m still a junior dev with years of experience in IT. One of the things I’ve noticed since making the switch is that (at least where I work) documentation is inconsistent.
Things I encounter include incomplete documentation, outdated documentation and written process details that have assumed knowledge which makes it difficult for junior Devs to pick up.
I’ve had a search and a lot of what is out there talks more about product and how to document that SDLC rather than best practice in writing and organising documents against the actual software engineering and its processes.
Does anyone have any good sources or suggestions on how I could look to try and begin to improve documentation within my team?
Partial documentation combined with complex code will be great for your bank account.
Code fast, and badly, always under promise and over deliver. Before the shit hits the fan, move to another place.
Next person after you will take the blame. You may be hired again at premium as you can deliver. Blame the replacement Dev for breaking the code and causing a lot of damage.
Fix the little that is possible, at premium rate and move on.
Bare minimum place to start: See if you can get the team to agree that these documents should exist in every project root folder:
- README.md - What is this even for? Audience: Managers.
- CONTRIBUTING.md - What steps are needed to build this? What steps are needed to be able to run the tests? Audience: Developers.
- CHANGELOG.txt - Describes the contents of every tagged release. Audience: end users.
Stretch goal: pick a spot (readme is fine) and make a list of sources (data in) and sinks (data out). Include contact information for whoever can reset the credentials or fix the firewall.
Keep it all together with the code and use f.e. asciidoctor or rst ( python ). There is also doxygen but it’s not most user friendly
AsciiDoc ath Antora FTW!