Category: Wiki

Developers Aren't Gonna Read It

November 20, 2008 by pbielicki

Developers are the customers - from time to time. They are the customers for product definition/specification team that is preparing technical specification documents. It doesn't really matter whether you work in an agile or non-agile environment - I'm sure you have some technical documentation and the main goal of it is to answer developers' questions on technical issues (e.g. how to configure some components to work with others, how to map fields from GUI forms to XML message, etc.) It also helps test or QA team to prepare acceptance tests and to verify whether what developers implemented is what was specified (I know it stinks a bit the waterfall but stay tuned - I will say something about agile documentation soon).

I would suggest you reading an article on TAGRI (They Aren't Gonna Read It) by Scott W. Ambler - it's really great. And in my post I'm going to give you real-life example from what I experienced regarding documentation. I will share with you my opinions of what kind of documentation sucks and what documents are really cool and useful (btw. my dream documentation is the one with which I'm able to find accurate information of my interest quickly and be able to put this information into my head in less than 10 minutes - the picture you see is a total contradiction of my dream - it's a waterfall process).

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