DEV Community

Discussion on: #DEVDiscuss: Documentation Workflows

Collapse
 
ryencode profile image
Ryan Brown

I'm genuinely curious, in a corporate environment, as to the amount of Write-Only documentation you feel you write?

Myself, I feel like most of my documentation is Write-Only. We use Confluence and even though it's search hands relevant documents as the literal first result, I'm constantly asked for it. When handing those documents to people, they just want me to walk them through it again. On asking what is wrong with the docs (worded more like: what needs to change?, what is missing?) I'm told they are great.

I believe a big part of this is we have a lot of VERY niche people. Their technical skills are DEEP in their one area and anything outside of that is ¯_(ツ)_/¯ and where we have problems are when they are asked to do things outside of their tech silos. My own bias here is that I'm a generalist by nature (ADHD as the excuse why I can't focus exclusively on just one tech silo) so to jump into a new tech (such as GIT) isn't as much of a barrier and reading docs to learn is second nature so not doing so is alien to me.

We have 100s of projects and a soft-req that each thing has updated documentation (detailed technical, detailed user docs and detailed support docs) and I honestly fight back on the scale of docs asked for that as most of it is write-only.
//finished ranting :D - for now -

Collapse
 
jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard

The problem is that Confluence sucks for finding the place where you wrote the damn thing. People usually don't go there, but if they do you need to give them yourself the link. This is so so bad.