Why develop good internal documentation?
• Sorry to say this folks, but employees leave. They get better jobs, or get fired, or for some reason or another leave your organization. By having your coders maintain well written documentation you give yourself two advantages: • You protect yourself against workers leaving with legacy application knowledge, and • You shorten the ramp-up time of the new employees that take over the application. • You automatically create a lasting knowledge base for any problems that might arise in the future. A documentation system, if properly designed and maintained, can make finding obscure answers to even more obscure problems take much less time. And what about good external documentation? • PEOPLE MIGHT ACTUALLY USE IT!! Yes, this is an obvious one but think about it: there are only a few truly elite coders for whatever system you may developing. They are the people who will be able to (and more importantly, have the time to) manually go through your API and automagically know how to develop
