Many of these SMEs will be engineers. Your developers are likely to know the product so well that it may be hard to get practical answers from them that can translate into documentation. Documentation should not only be written by technical writers — it should ideally be a synchronized collaboration between your documentation team, engineers, and support.
You need to make time for the technical review so that your SMEs can verify the accuracy of your documentation, as well as testing your docs on users.
We already touched on Quality Assurance QA for your documentation a little when we talked about using Agile methodologies. Documentation should not be published until it has been subject to technical verification, which is the point when QA tests your documentation to see if whatever solution you have presented works.
Your customers should not be the first testers of your documentation, or you have failed to provide working docs. Build this testing phase into your Agile process so that team members leave time to test before the product or feature ships. You also need to include a phase where the relevant members of the product or engineering team review your documentation to check for technical accuracy, so this is where strong relationships between teams come in very handy.
Make sure you formalize your process to ensure all team members appreciate the importance of the documentation. Closing the customer feedback loop is all part of the Agile process. Agile development should be continuous communication between the development team and the customer, at all stages of the process. From beta testing with a research group, to feedback on the first release, and ongoing feedback from customers, you need to keep your finger on the pulse.
Closing the feedback loop means connecting the feedback with the right internal department. If customer support gets an issue with the software, this needs to be passed on to the engineering team and logged as a bug or a feature request. You absolutely need a style guide for your software documentation, just like you would for your marketing activities.
The main things you should cover in your style guide are:. For advice on grammatical choices, such as whether to use the Oxford Comma, you can check standard style guides such as the Chicago Manual of Style.
Adopt a coherent writing style, especially if you are using teams of writers who all write in different styles. This all adds to the User Experience of the documentation, which we will discuss later. And you can either make them yourself, search online, or find them in enterprise content tools like Atlassian Confluence.
You will need to consider the User Experience UX of your documentation, especially customer-facing help content. Just writing the content is half the battle — how do customers feel when they encounter your knowledge base? Are they able to easily find what they need? If you invest in the proper knowledge base software like Helpjuice, you will have built-in templates with UX designed just for documentation users.
Information Architecture refers to:. When you get to a certain point in your documentation, you need to seriously consider how people with different needs will be able to use your documentation. For example, consider whether your users are from international audiences when actually writing content. You want to avoid the use of idioms and references that they might not understand.
Accessibility relates to the User Experience of the documentation tool itself. For example, consider whether it will be accessible to a person using a screen reader, which will read the test aloud to a person using it. Images with text overlaid are not accessible, so think about your screenshots and make sure they have accompanying text.
Take into consideration the contrasting colors of your knowledge base design, and how you style links, to ensure other users with visual impairments can engage with your site successfully. Take this example from Write the Docs' website:. The site design is very clear, easy to use, with underlined links and short paragraphs. The black and white color scheme provides a high contrast for visually impaired users. Better cross-team alignment.
Thorough documentation brings clarity and transparency to what everyone is working on. As a result, decisions and discussions don't get scattered over chat and email, less time is spent in meetings, and work is less likely to get duplicated. More effective knowledge management. The insights and lessons learned from one project can be transferred to new projects. Capturing and sharing this knowledge can help you develop new best practices, prevent repeated mistakes, and continuously improve your team's overall performance.
But in order to deliver on these goals, your internal documentation needs to be well-written, accurate, and up-to-date. In this guide, we will cover the tools and best practices you can use to improve the quality of your project documentation.
There are many different tools you can use to document a project — Google Docs, Confluence and a variety of Confluence alternatives , different types of internal wikis and knowledge bases , and more. Depending on the size of your team and your approach to project management, your requirements may differ.
Some teams need complex solutions with advanced features, such as built-in approval workflows and automated tasks, while others prefer simpler and easier tools with no learning curve. Whatever tool you choose, make sure all project stakeholders know how to use it. In any case, an ideal project documentation tool should:. One such tool is Nuclino. It works like a collective brain, allowing you to bring all your team's knowledge, docs, and projects together in one place — create an account and give it a try:.
Part of what makes project documentation seem so frustrating — and even useless — is that the finished documents are often not read by anyone. Documentation is created only because it's what you're expected to do, and then immediately forgotten and discarded.
There are a few ways to ensure that the time you invest in documenting your project is not wasted:. Project-related communication tends to scatter across meetings, chat, email, and shared drives, leaving your team without a single source of truth. Instead, bring all project-related documents together in one place and don't waste time hunting through outdated Confluence pages or stale emails.
The easier you make it for people to find the information they need, the more likely they will be to read the documentation. Make sure your documentation tool is equipped with a reliable and fast search feature. While it's important to keep your project documentaion thorough, it also needs to be concise. Although required documentation can vary by project or industry, below are the key standard documents you need for each phase of a project:.
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Software Project Documentation Template. Agile Project Documentation Template. Website Project Documentation Template. IT Project Documentation Template. Data Science Project Documentation Template. Software documentation is an umbrella term that can refer to wide variety of documents in software development and project management processes.
Basically, they help people get oriented when using or working on a software. Software Documentation should include the following: For user-focused documentation:. Working on a software project? We bet you and your team members would benefit from a streamlined documentation process, and here are couple reasons why:. Unfortunately, software documentation is greatly overlooked.
Whether you're producing documentation for users or developers, it will ultimately provide them with comprehensive information and get their questions answered. You'll save time that would otherwise be spent answering the same questions over and over again. Once you get into the habit of putting together software documentation, it'll help your project's and business's overall organization a great deal.
Consistent documentation helps project teams establish solid workflows by building effective habits and producing reference documents that can be checked throughout the lifecycle of your software product and beyond.
As your project moves through different phases, you'll likely need to bring new faces onboard. Software documentation will help new programmers and developers get oriented quickly, allowing them to get to work and start contributing right away. No one person is a master of everything. Keeping effective software documentation on a collaborative platform like Slite allows people to work together and unite their strengths. One person might be a source code and html expert, while another might know everything about usability, wireframes and UML diagrams.
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