Creating a Culture of Documentation

Picture this: you’ve found an awesome new project on GitHub. It does exactly what you’re looking for, and it’s open-source. Amazing! This is going to change your life. So you roll up your sleeves and get going with it. But then, you run into an error. You Google it. StackOverflow. You search and search and search. You find similar queries, but never the answer. You pour over the code, hoping it helps, but the README file is no help. 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, who wrangled the application, who made it work. Engineers are focused, and busy. 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. What is put together is often incomplete or badly written.

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.