Why version control systems (VCS) have become so important for technical writers

Carmela Greco
Nov 2 · 3 min read
“Homeoffice” (CC BY 2.0) by Nico Kaiser

Version control systems (VCS) allow the developers to collaborate on a project. VCSs tracks the changes applied to the project files by the team members and manages the concurrency of changes on the same files.
So for example, if two developers are working on the same file and apply some changes to the same lines, the conflict that is generated by this concurrent change will be managed using the VCS. The final result is a coherent version of the project that contains all the contributions made by the team members.

So a VCS is an essential tool for a developer, but why in the world a technical writer should use it?
First of all because if you are a software technical writer you are surrounded by developers that use it. VCS is a powerful tool that allows you as a technical writer to share in a very efficient way the documentation with the rest of the team.

Git is a free and open-source distributed version control system; it’s probably the most popular DVCS nowadays. GitHub is the largest online storage space of collaborative projects with over 37 million users (May 2019).

“Github” (CC BY-SA 2.0) by Andrew*

When it comes to managing the documentation by using Git and GitHub the approach is the same that a developer would use to manage its code.
You can use Git on the terminal or install a user interface (GitHub Desktop or is pretty popular, a complete list can be found here).

The Git workflow can be summarized in the following steps:

  1. locally clone the remote repository of your project hosted on GitHub
  2. create a new branch where you will create/modify the documentation
  3. push the changes from your local repository to the remote one

At that point, the changes can be approved by the team and merged into the project.
This is the way the developers are used to work and this is the way that makes them happy.
Last but not least, having the documentation and the code in the same place would make the developers more prone to collaborate with the documentation if needed.

In this context just forget about the old-style documentation on PDFs. Documentation (especially software one) goes easily out of date. You can keep a good maintenance of it only if you host it online and manage it through a VCS.

Learning how to use Git and Github could be challenging at first, especially if you have no coding experience. But they are extremely powerful and efficient tools and, in the end, it will be worth it.

Carmela Greco

Written by

Tech enthusiast, web developer and technical writer. Passionate about reading and writing.

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