Dev Docs - What is it?

#TechnicalDocumentation #FunctionalQuality

I have been asked about this topic for a really long long time. Everyone is telling the same thing: Let the developers decide what kind of documents they want to read.

However, no one steps out of the dark telling me "when” should be the right time for the developers to decide that. Normally, the Business Analyst has to guess what the development team wants to have before they even write their first line of code.

---

According to “Docs for Developers”- An Engineer's Field Guide to Technical Writing: A document is good when it fulfills its purpose. When considering and measuring document quality, consider functional quality and structural quality.

• Functional quality of a document describes whether or not the document accomplishes the goal it sets out to achieve. It examines at a fundamental level whether or not the document works.

  • Accessible

  • Purposeful

  • Findable

  • Accurate

  • Complete

• Structural quality of a document describes how well it's written. This includes sentence, paragraph, and header structure, quality of language, and accuracy of grammar. Structural quality encapsulates how easy a document is to read.

  • Clear

  • Concise

  • Consistent