Creating a Culture of Documentation

The importance of good documentation in improving productivity, retaining customers, and managing changes in a company.

• Good documentation is easy to understand, gets to the point, and has been vetted for accuracy
• It includes the author and date, and addresses the right audience
• Visual elements such as headings, callouts, and tables make documentation more engaging
• Documentation tools such as Markdown, Read the Docs, and Confluence can help standardize and streamline the process
• Empowering contributors and creating a positive feedback loop can encourage more people to write documentation
• Managing documentation should be an official part of everyone's job description

A Fortune 500 company reduced content overload and support calls by 35% by hiring documentation writers and implementing guidelines for future releases of documentation.

Picture this: you’ve found a new project on GitHub. It does exactly what you’re looking for, and it’s open-source. Amazing! So you roll up your sleeves and get to it. But then, you run into an error. You Google it. You find similar queries, but never the answer. You pour over the code. You search for anything documenting this project, but keep coming up empty. This project would be perfect, but no one ever documented it. Far too often, the information we need is never found. It stays locked in the minds of the engineers who wrote the code. But what good is code that no one knows how to use? Documentation is every bit as important as making sure the project works. That buy-in can be hard. Stakeholders don’t want to pay for the time. Project managers don’t prioritize the work. Engineers don’t want to do it. The only way to solve this problem is to create a culture around documentation. In this session, we’ll talk about how to elevate the status of the humble documentation to its rightful place alongside your code. We’ll cover how to integrate the documentation process into your existing processes so that your engineers are on board, and how to show stakeholders and others who push back that documentation is not only worthwhile, but essential to the success of your project.