Technical and business documentation on IT project — what are they and what should they consist of?

As the matter of a fact, technical documentation of IT project is a term with a big number of definitions. It is so, because each software has its own standards of creating documents on during the development process. What is called “technical documentation” by one company, can be called “business documentation” or “project specification” by the other. You could also have heard about “product documentation”, “process documentation” and many other types of it. Let’s start from explaining what is the purpose of creating such documents.

What is the reason for making documentation on IT projects?

While listing all the reasons why project documentation is being created on IT projects, we will probably answer the question: what kind of documents can you be provided with by a chosen software house.

First, the business documentation is necessary to gather all the requirements for the project. Product specification is one of the most important document for the team of developers that work on the project. After all, everyone needs to know what they have to build.

There are also very technical documents created during or after the development. All the details about used technology, functions, and algorithms etc. are described there. It is really useful for developers working on the project, because when can check how each part of the application is built. Such information is important for customers’ in-house team of IT experts that will take care of the product in the future after the development process is done.

And the last but not the least important reason for writing documentation — in case of misunderstanding between customer and team responsible for the project, requirements formulated by the customer are always there in black and white.

Now, let’s have a look at the types of documentation that can be created on the IT project.

A business documentation

An IT project usually starts with a series of meetings and workshops, during which a customer explains his expectations for the final product (website, business software, web or mobile application, single feature etc.). A team of developers, designers, consultants, and managers suggest some solutions or features that will help to turn a customer vision into reality, and they are creating a project/product specification that can be also called business documentation. Because of its function, it is usually created at the very beginning of the project.

Business documentation is usually written in simple, easy to understand and non-technical language. It describes the product to be developed and provides instructions on features and how certain tasks should be performed with it — so such a document should contain all requirements, some tech specifications, business logic, and manuals for the end-user.

A technical documentation

A technical documentation can be also called product documentation. Apart from a business documentation, technical document is usually a lot more complex, and is being written for IT specialists. It contains names of functions, classes, databases etc. Developers create it during the development process or soon after completing some task.

This type of documentation is useful for the development team, when many experts cooperate on some task. It is indispensable after the development is completed, and the product is being transferred to the client in-house team. With well-prepared, detailed technical documentation, they can easily maintain new software and understand how it works.

What will you find in our business documentation?

Our business documentation is a detailed document that includes all crucial information, and you may ever need after development process will end. The primary goal of creating it is to provide you with description of business logic and manuals for the end users. We want to make sure that you’ll be able to fully benefit from the created software.

In project documentation you’ll also find information about technical and functional requirements, tech stack that will be used for building your application and full list of the features that will be built.

Apart from that we will describe all possible roles of the user and explain what are the administrator privileges and capabilities. We prepare case study for better understanding of all processes that can be handled with the delivered product.

How can you tell if IT project documentation is well-prepared?

As a customer, you probably want to be sure that you’ll be provided with great business and technical documentation of your project. There are many types of documents that can be prepared on the project. The most important is that you and your IT employees would be able to understand documentation and use it to take advantage of the product and maintain it properly.

We write our project documentation for our customers, hence we put all our efforts in creating easy to understand, detailed documents that will enable you to gain competitive advantage fast with your new IT product.