Documentation is an often overlooked part of technical projects. There are many reasons.
A few of my “favorites” are the expense, lack of time, and people just like to do it. Well, documentation is important. It is very easy to understand that a lack of documentation costs big money and consumes tons of time when it is needed.
Tips
1) Understand your audience. Creating documentation that is too technical or off base doesn’t help anyone.
2) Build the right documentation and focus on ease of maintenance. Hard to maintain documentation quickly falls behind the production system.
3) Use tools to generate documentation wherever possible and include this in your SDLC process.
4) Leverage users, stakeholders, business analysts, project managers, and technical people. Documentation is a team effort.
Types of Documentation
Quick Reference
User Manuals
User Technical Notes
User Bulletins
FAQ’s (Frequently Asked Questions)
Knowledge Base and Wiki’s
Business Requirements (ie. Use Cases)
Functional Design
Systems Design
Developer (Internal and External)
Database (Users and Technical)
Operations
Security
Benchmark
Quality Assurance (ie. Test Cases)
Change History