Showing posts with label documentation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label documentation. Show all posts

Monday, April 13, 2015

Serving up POD & The five Cs of Good Documentation

I'm a fanatic about documentation.  As a developer that has been involved in creating tools for other developers all my career, I understand the importance of good documentation.  Creating good documentation is not easy, which is why so few people write good documentation.  Here's an easy to remember grading system for your documentation.  Does it meet the five Cs test?

 Is your documentation...

  1. Correct
  2. Complete
  3. Comprehensible
  4. Current
  5. Convenient

I probably don't need to go into too much detail here, but if ain't complete, correct, comprehensible and current it may be worse than no documentation at all.  If it ain't convenient it really doesn't matter how correct, complete, comprehensible or current it is, now does it?  It's not easy meeting all 5 Cs all of the time.  Most likely your documentation will transition through various permutations of those Cs during the software development lifecycle.  So how can we at least make our documentation more convenient and accessible and at least allows us to make an attempt to meet the 5Cs?