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Discussion on: What's worse: Stale documentation or no documentation?

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Christophe Colombier

I depend on what is the documenation about.

If it's about code, then I prefer to have nothing, but also the time needed to understand the code, code is almost always self explanatory.

But then, if you have nothing and what were looking for is about either:

  • the reason why we made some choices.
  • the functionals of what the code is trying to achieve
  • a deal almost forgotten by team, that still bring money to the company.
  • etc ...

Think about a service that make external calls to a black box. Or a client that calls an old APIs you have. Having a contact name is priceless.

In such cases, I always prefer to have a walking dead documentation than nothing, because the code cannot help me.