Maybe five reasons why you need up to date documentation?
As devs, we sometimes need to push to get time to update documentation. It’s hard to justify when there’s deadlines, feature requests, or when a team has stayed together for a long time. But I want to offer five reasons why stale documentation is bad. Is it worse then no documentation though?
I feel like I shouldn’t have to say this though:
Information silos. When documentation is out of date, information usually gets spread by word of mouth. This approach is not scalable. And means that a few people hold all the information.
- Feeling like I’m wasting time either my own, trying to figure things out by myself. Or my team mates as I ask them a million questions.
- Lack of trust in all documentation. If I start to see stale docs pop up, I question is everything I come across is valid or not. And I might ignore good documentation and opt for asking team mates. A boy who cried wolf situation.
- Silos of information. If your docs are out of date, information usually gets spread word of mouth. This approach is not scalable. And means that a few people need to hold all the information.
If we kept our documentation up to date then we wouldn’t run into any of these things.
In reality, high touch pieces of documentation get updated quite frequently. Things like onboarding docs for example. One task of a new person onboarding is to update the docs. However, the context of someone new on the team is limited. The problem is updating the docs after a decision has been made during a project.
Since we’re a remote team, I like hosting a coworking room where people can come in and out throughout the day. Working together and chatting. Although I can see doc days being a great thing to do in person.
Testing tina edit.