Documentation: The Chicken and the Egg
Posted: Tue, 18 September 2007 | permalink | No comments
The other day, as I was putting a couple of pages of documentation together for a company-internal development project, I got this terrible feeling of malaise about what I was writing. "Why the hell am I bothering writing this lot? It's a given that nobody's ever going to read it." Why? Because nobody reads documentation.
Funnily enough, I tend to work the other way, too. While I will often go looking for help through Google, checking for assistance in structured, project-produced documentation (manuals, et al) is usually one of the last things I'll try. Why? Because nobody writes documentation.
Now, given that I feel minimal motivation to write documentation because nobody reads it, and I don't usually read documentation because nobody writes it (probably because nobody reads it), an obvious question comes to mind: did one of these states come first, which then caused the other? Are we in an ever-deepening spiral of shite docs, the logical end of which is just giving up and reverting to code reading and experimentation?
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