The Shocking Truth: Why Ignoring Documentation Could Be Sabotaging Your Success! 📚🚨

To understand why documentation is an important process, it is vital to understand what it is.

What is a Document?

A Document can be of various types, such as:

• A Business Document
• A Financial Document
• A Technical Document
• A Product Guide Document

But we will be doing a deep dive into the technical document for now.

What does Technical Documentation mean?

A Process of documenting the approaches and workflows that a developer or a team of developers has taken to build that particular product / feature / service.

Technical Document

As an experienced developer myself, I do not like the documentation phase after a bug, feature, service or project completion. This is because writing a document is a boring process when you can solve actual real-world problems and save the world through your exceptional coding skills.

A technical document not only helps you but also helps other people to understand people about the project / feature / service that you and your team have built.

A few days back, my team and I took a deep dive into one of our old projects, and I was the one who was leading that project. As my team and I hated the documentation process, we skipped it at that time. My team and worked on that project around 3 months back, and due to a change in the business requirement, we had to update this service. All of us in my team, including me, were struggling to understand the service we had written only a few months back. We all went through multiple lines of code which we wrote, and still were not able to understand some workflows.

In the end, we were able to make the changes, but this process cost us a lot of time and effort, which would have been saved with a simple document which we all ignored at that time.

The above experience made us realise the importance of the technical document and its process, and how much time we all could have saved if we had just documented the project at that time.

How to Write a Technical Document?

There is no correct way to write a technical document. The main goal of this document is to guide you in future on what you have done when you were building a specific service.

The “God is in Details”, you need to add as much detail as you can while writing your technical document. You might have referred to some research papers when building a service, and you always try to include the basic flow diagram of the service, as it gives you a basic, high-level understanding of the service in just a glance, and it becomes your source of truth.

What does good documentation look like?

A Good document is easy to read and understand, and provides a clear explanation of the concepts applied and the underlying architecture of the framework.

For reference, Links to a few Amazing Products / organisations documents:

• Flutter
• Digital Ocean
• Apple’s Swift 5
• Microsoft’s Azure

Note:- These are my thoughts on what a good technical document should look like. It is not a standard format. Adhere to your organisation’s documentation patterns and rules.

Conclusion:

A technical document is an important document for all the product managers / developers / stakeholders as it holds the key information about the product, teams and all the crucial details required by your organisation.