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⭐Crafting Effective Documentation

Laura Grassi on December 15, 2023

In this article, I will share my experience in creating documentation for a project at the company I work for, X-Team (https://x-team.com/). ...
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JorensM

Great article, thanks for the tips. One thing I'm a bit skeptical of though is mixing project docs, user manual and code docs. I agree that in some cases including probably yours this is viable, but I think in most cases this would be a hassle because you'd have to read/scroll/search through a lot of irrelevant content that you might not even understand. Other than that, solid tips and thanks for the article!

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Nikola Buhinicek

Altho all this sounds so obvious, it's often forgotten and done in a strange manner. Great read 👏🏼

One question - do you think that the pause in development was necessary? Could this have been done in parallel with feature development?

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Gift Masekere

Great questions. I am looking forward to see them answered

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Laura Grassi

In our case, we also underwent a restructuring, so we went through a more "quiet" period where we were mainly focused on stabilizing our system (no new features). This resulted in very few tasks, and in our situation, my team consists of only two people, which sometimes made the deadlines a bit challenging to meet given the numerous pending features, bugs, etc... It turned out to be the perfect time to make progress on that, but now we will continue to update the documentation in parallel.

I don't believe it's imperative to halt all activities for construction. However, this decision hinges on the demand and team size. Realistically, when projects demand attention to numerous tasks, Product Owners seldom grant the flexibility to allocate time specifically for documentation work during the week, cause there are a bunch of another urgent things before that... Regrettably, it must be acknowledged that everything hinges on the scenario; dependencies seem to be an inevitable part of the equation hehe

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Nikola Buhinicek

I get it, thanks 🙏🏼

In Productive, we are also working a lot on documentation as we figured out that we have a lot of 'debt' in that field.

Currently, we are working on it in parallel where we both cover the new features we are working on and we write the missing pieces. For us, this was a good approach.

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Northon Iserhardt

Great content, congratulations!

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O Primo Dev

Awesome article 🔥

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Filipe Dos Santos

Nice, clear and objective 👏👏👏

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Giancarlo Salomone

Artigo muito bom 👏

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Luís Gustavo

Gostei do template. Vc que fez? Ou usou alguma ferramenta pronta pra criar?

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Laura Grassi

Utilizamos o CODA como nossa ferramenta principal, e, se o que entendi como template for o que penso que é, então sim, fui eu quem criei :3

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Joe Arauzo

What are your thoughts on Documentation-as-Code, AsciiDoctor, and Antora?

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David Hughes

Great info, thanks for sharing!

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Diego Prado

Great content, Laura!

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Johannes Dienst

Great article!

The most challenging part is the beginning. The key is to understand for whom the documentation is being created and its purpose.

This!