Documentation

RTFM

Do you remember what you did six months ago?

Good documentation is often underrated. There are two aspects to documentation that are important to put in place as early as possible in the project life cycle.

Developer Documentation

Ensuring code, workflows, infrastructure, environment configurations, shared glossaries as well as less tangible aspects of a project like key decisions is absolutely essential for the long term sustainability of any project. Knowing how a system and the code that runs it is put together helps with the onboarding of new developers and suppliers and reduces the overhead of maintaining and diagnosing the system.

End User Documentation

A system should be as self explanatory as possible and where we are developing a system this is our goal. However it is still necessary to ensure that end users have the documentation they need to use the system in as self-sufficient manner as possible. They also need to know where to go to find help.