“Documentation”, a word that makes developers yawn. It’s what you write because you have to. Documentation is a failure by definition. You know it, it’s true. Writing it is going to be a tiresome, mindnumbing exercise. Documentation is going to be incomplete, outdated, unreliable and soon to be abandoned anyway. Why would you ever start working on it in the first place?
That’s why we were happy when we discovered the Agile Manifesto, which says: “Working software over comprehensive documentation” That’s a good reason to drop all our documentation efforts, right? Well, no. We shouldn’t quit writing docs. We should simply prevent documentation from being an impediment to other prominent Agile values, like “Responding to change”.
In this talk, I’ll cover the Principles of Living Documentation. I’ll show you many ways to make your documentation activities effortless and more fun. Your docs will never be outdated anymore, everything will be version-controlled, automatically built and ready to share with anyone who’s interested. Any day, any time.
59. What needs to be documented?
• Knowledge that is of interest for a long period.
• Knowledge that is of interest to a large number
of people.
• Knowledge that is valuable or critical.
67. Specifications
Feature:
In order to ...
As a ...
I want to be able to ...
Scenario:
Given ...
When ...
Then ...
Documentation!
Reconciliation
mechanism!