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> I can see people writing software for love, but who writes all the documentation? 1. People like me? :) I genuinely love writing documentation. Though I shou
by clicks 13y ago
> I can see people writing software for love, but who writes all the documentation?
1. People like me? :) I genuinely love writing documentation. Though I should mention it's easier to write books/tutorials than to write detailed documentation of the software you are yourself not writing, which brings me to point 2.
2. Writing documentation is very much a part of software-writing. It's usually best to do write documentation as you're writing the software... I haven't met anyone yet who really hated the process, so I wouldn't consider this to be a big problem at all.
- mathattack 13y agoIt was not meant as an attack at all. It just seems to be a very under-appreciated skill. I've yet to see a firm whose documentation is current more than 6 months after a major release. If you're able to keep up, you're more in the minority than your realize. :-)
- tjr 13y agoI too write documentation. Not exclusively, but in my day job I often write manuals and other documents for our software, and I've done documentation work as a volunteer for Project GNU. It's no more strange that someone would enjoy writing documentation that it is that someone would enjoy writing software, though just as non-developers don't understand the joy of programming, I imagine that non-writers don't understand the joy of documenting.
- mathattack 13y agoFair enough. I think my bias showed. :-) So a question in return... Do you share my belief that documentation tends to lag in most projects? And if so, is the bottleneck not enough documentation writers, or not enough engineering time and attention? I've assumed it's the latter, though it could be the former. Or is it something else?
- tjr 13y agoDo you share my belief that documentation tends to lag in most projects? Absolutely. I suspect that the number of people interested in writing software documentation is fairly small: they have to have enough knowledge of software engineering to be able to understand what they are writing about, and they have to be good writers. Anyone could learn software development, but not everyone does. And anyone could learn how to write well, but not everyone does. So the set of people who learn both is even smaller. On commercial software engineering projects, my experience is that documentation of any sort is made as much of an afterthought as possible, if even that. Unless there's some business case (i.e., obvious money) that comes from spending time on documentation, then it doesn't make it very high on the priority list. Which is unfortunate, because as a software developer, I've wasted a lot of time figuring things out that should have been documented. So money can be saved later on, even if no money is "earned" up front. For free / open source projects, the story may be different. There's not necessarily paid engineering staff involved, so if documentation doesn't get written, I can only presume that the developers either didn't want to, didn't know they should, or felt incapable of writing it. I find it hard to imagine taking a principled stand against having good documentation. BUT... in my anecdotal experience, I've encountered volunteer open source software developers who in fact did seem resistant to accepting offers of volunteer help with documentation. So I'm not really sure what's up with that.