Documentation is not something that comes naturally to programmers, we are more concerned about creating, problem solving, and of course developing software. I came upon a personal revelation: document important items, and taking notes make you a better developer. I advocate documenting, only what’s important for you, what’s important for other team members, and what would be important for some one inheriting the project.
My personal preference is for using a wiki rather than some sort of specialized documentation. A wiki can be shared, community editable, and open enough it can support almost any teams needs. The disclaimer is Personally I think wikis are about the best thing since sliced bread.
Once you choose a documentation implementation, whether it be a wiki, text file, or other solution. You have to start using it. Starting documentation is generally an easy affair. You go through the application you are working on, document things like servers ips, logins, connection strings, deployment processes, how tos, faqs, and general notes. This is your bare bones documentation.
The hard part of documentation is to keep it going. Keep a log of important meetings, decisions and events that occur, this allows you to go back 3 weeks later and look up what color the save button should be, or who should receive the emails from the contact us form. Keeping a historical log will also let you go back, and review the painful parts, and the successes. A fun benefit is you can go back and see why something was done, and blame it on that person.
Keeping updated notes and documentation on any software project can only help a project be successful, but if you don’t have the documentation and you do need it you can be up a creek. To put it in geeky terms it is a pseudo pascals wager.
Documentation is worth the effort, because the process of keeping notes makes you more aware of the ins and outs of the project, and by keeping a project document it helps you truly understand a project, and how all the pieces work together. Personally I have found keeping documentation a great boon, and I can only recommend it.
