Hey all, I’m still a junior dev with years of experience in IT. One of the things I’ve noticed since making the switch is that (at least where I work) documentation is inconsistent.
Things I encounter include incomplete documentation, outdated documentation and written process details that have assumed knowledge which makes it difficult for junior Devs to pick up.
I’ve had a search and a lot of what is out there talks more about product and how to document that SDLC rather than best practice in writing and organising documents against the actual software engineering and its processes.
Does anyone have any good sources or suggestions on how I could look to try and begin to improve documentation within my team?
Be bold and make changes. Document what you find out, what is outdated, what is missing.
Take ownership. If there’s nobody that oversees overall structure, be the one to do so - at least where you’re touching it or are being bothered by it.
Diatraxis gives some great insight and considerations input into writing and structuring documentation. Namely how different target audiences and doc use cases require different forms and detail levels of guidance.
My company’s internal doc/guidance also links to https://www.writethedocs.org/guide/ which seems like a good source.
Sort of interesting that this documentation system appeared in two different places that don’t seem to reference each other.
Looking at the Web Archive; Diatraxis has been around since 2021. That divio docs since May of this year.
I doubt they didn’t “get inspiration” from Diatraxis.
I’ve been referencing that Divio doc since 2021, possibly earlier in 2020. I even linked to the document in early 2022. It’s quite likely that it simply wasn’t crawled by the Web Archive before May this year.
Bare minimum place to start: See if you can get the team to agree that these documents should exist in every project root folder:
- README.md - What is this even for? Audience: Managers.
- CONTRIBUTING.md - What steps are needed to build this? What steps are needed to be able to run the tests? Audience: Developers.
- CHANGELOG.txt - Describes the contents of every tagged release. Audience: end users.
Stretch goal: pick a spot (readme is fine) and make a list of sources (data in) and sinks (data out). Include contact information for whoever can reset the credentials or fix the firewall.
I would say as a new junior dev you are uniquely placed to help with this. Documentation tends to be written by people who know a lot about a thing and they try to imagine what might be useful for someone. Someone new coming in with a fresh perspective can help uncover assumed knowledge or missing leaps to make the documentation better. One of the common onboarding steps I’ve seen is to go back and update/improve the onboarding docs after you’ve just been onboarded for example.
I would say pick your battles though because documentation can be a never ending task and documents are almost always out of date shortly after they are written. Think about what would have saved you time or mental overhead if it was just written down and fix those first.
As far as organising and writing, every place is different and it can depend on the tools your org is using. In general I’d at least have links to relevant docs as close to where they might be needed as possible. Like how to set up and get up and running with a code base should probably be documented directly in the readme, or at least linked to if it’s overly complicated.
Hopefully that’s at least somewhat helpful. It’s definitely a problem basically everywhere I have worked though, you have to do what you can and not stress too much about it.
Thanks for this. As part of onboarding I have been trying to update where I can. There are times I wonder if I am adding to docs what others may perceive as fluff as it may be something obvious to them. I like to work with a “If we’re all on a bus that goes over a cliff, does someone new have everything they need?” mentality.
At present the team is using GitHub Pages, which almost feels like a hurdle itself in updating the documentation quickly and keeping it organised and consistent. Being a junior I personally prefer a WYSIWYG. From your experience is there any pros/cons in using a WYSIWYG vs Markdown?
No worries, sounds like you’re definitely on the right track with your approach.
In terms of the style of editor I don’t have a strong preference, I think the most important thing is discoverability which generally means putting docs where they are expected to be found and using whatever your team or org is using. Personally I have a slight preference for markdown mainly because it’s easy to version control, see who wrote what (so I can ask them questions) and use all the tools I’m used to that work well with plain text. Tools that use more WYSIWYG style can be good too though and many of them like Notion have the advantage of making it relatively easy to search across your entire companies documentation assuming everyone uses the one tool.
For my personal notes I use Logseq which I highly recommend. It’s a bit of both, markdown under the hood but with a simple editor that lets you focus on writing notes, tasks and links.
The Code is my Bible.
Things I encounter include incomplete documentation, outdated documentation and written process details that have assumed knowledge which makes it difficult for junior Devs to pick up.
Yeah seems about right… off the top of my head:
- self-host a wiki, use it to document stuff
- write clean code that your future self will have an easy time reading
- avoid automated documenting tools
Writings self documenting code is so important.
Comments get stale and over time transition from: accurate to outdated, to eventually flat-out lies.
Go hard in the paint when choosing method or variable names. If it’s hard to give them coherent names, that’s a code smell.
Comments get stale and over time transition from: accurate to outdated, to eventually flat-out lies.
Sounds like some people aren’t doing their work enough then. Code comments are part of the work that a programmer should do, not an afterthought. Who else is gonna update that code if not the programmer? And if a programmer isn’t supposed to update their code and we can just all write clean code that would somehow make us all be better engineers (yeah, I use this title differently from programmers), then why are code comments even a thing?
Self-documenting code is good and all, but so should there be good comments.
I agree that would be ideal.
I flat out do not trust each of the 500 devs operating on our codebase to maintain comments.
Tests are documentation, code can be documentation. Those run through CI.
If you can keep comments updated at scale, do it. If you can’t don’t pray for a miracle and find something that you actually can enforce
If it’s closed source then it’s a losing battle to try and document code. I mean, do it when you feel it’s 100% necessary (e.g. complex code that you really can’t dumb down, “magic numbers” with a complicated backstory, test cases – it feels like that’s a different part of your brain so the transition is hard). Otherwise write code that almost reads like a sentence and don’t add complexity until you need it.
Others may find this sacrilege but this is one the best uses for ai at the moment. I toss it methods and ask it to describe what’s happening each method. Then after you’ve gone through a whole class ask it to describe the whole class. If you break it up well it can very quickly document massive code sets specifically for both technical and non technical people. Even better it can take that same documentation and convert it to highly detailed and advanced markdowns for wikis. This will also help you review your code. If the ai is having an issues understanding what you’re doing you can bet anyone else dropping into it without backup is going to have issues too. Particularly PO’s, QA, Scrum masters and all those they meet with when you’re not there. It has saved me repeatedly showing up in meetings where those other non technicals just “ho hum” their way through meeting questions, come back asking where docs are because they usually don’t even bother looking. “No one else had anything documented and we didn’t see it so we just wondered.” “Yep here it is, here’s it broken down by class, here’s the method, here’s the variable types in and out, and here’s the quick overview levels 1,2,3,4 and 5.” All getting progressively more technical. My PO has thanked me repeatedly for saving her ass in meetings where they complain about lack of documentation but not from me.
