The Importance of Technical Documentation in Software Development
What is technical documentation? What is its purpose? Is it important? Read more to find answers to these questions here.
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“There is nothing in the programming field more despicable than an undocumented program.” — Edward Yourdon
What is Technical Documentation?
Technical documentation in software development includes all documents and written materials related to the development of a software product in which there is documentation to explain the functionality of the product, and allow for communication if the client has significant questions to ask the development team.
What is the Purpose of Technical Documentation?
The main purpose of documentation is to ensure that the development team and stakeholders have a common goal to achieve the project.
Technical documentation serves as a guide to the software development process and assists in explaining the product to other departmental team members, such as the development team explaining to marketing members.
Does it really matter?
According to a study done by Geneca, 75% of errors in a software development project that may appear in subsequent stages originate from errors made at the requirements specification stage (initial phase).
To get software with minimal errors, software developers need to identify stakeholders, get user understanding for system planning and their requirements for the system, identify needs, clarify and iterate needs, analyze needs, and define needs so that all stakeholders have the same understanding.
Each analysis is a stage of collecting the needs of all elements of the software to be built.
From these activities, software requirements specifications, required software functions, software system performance, project scheduling, resource identification, and estimated software development costs are formed.
However, the process of collecting requirements often experiences obstacles or problems. Problems that may be encountered when collecting software requirements include:
- Stakeholders are confused about what is meant by “needs”.
- Lack of customer involvement
- Vague or ambiguous requirements due to the use of natural language in explaining the requirements.
- No prioritization because they think all needs are important
- Building functionality that no one uses due to users not being able to distinguish between needs and wants.
- Designers and programmers don’t want to work on incomplete specifications
- Customers often don’t know what they want, allowing for constantly changing requirements
- Users sometimes give proposed requirements informally to programmers, resulting in undocumented changes.
The Importance of Documentation
With the problems encountered during requirements gathering, documentation is important. Due to user needs or technological developments, it is very possible that software requires the addition or patching of modules here and there.
Documentation is also the solution for any changes that have been agreed upon and communicated to all interested parties so that estimated costs, technical risks, etc. become more measurable to reduce the possibility of software project failure.
Some software engineers may argue that “my code is self-documenting” or can be explained as the source code is already the documentation, so no additional documents are needed. This may be true if the software is built for itself. But what if the program is used by other people or the program is part of a software system that is being worked on by many people?
Without good documentation, as the next person to develop the software, you will be groping and guessing past syntaxes and user requirements. It could be that the needs of users in the past turned out to be very different from now. It could also be that there are purposes for using certain functions that the advanced development team did not realize the importance of. What is even more important is that documentation can be a means of accountability, both legally and scientifically, for the work of the software being developed.
I hope this post has provided you with some useful information to assist you in implementing successful documentation for your team.
