Programming

17495 readers

88 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

snowe

Ategon

[email protected]

Software Engineering Documentation Best Practice? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/programming

34 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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Things I encounter include incomplete documentation, outdated documentation and written process details that have assumed knowledge which makes it difficult for junior Devs to pick up.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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] MajorHavoc 21 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

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.