How to document software development

Your specification template should layout clear milestones. If your client writes the functional and user interface design, you should subsequently agree on a set of milestones.

Sometimes these are billing thresholds as well, but at the very least they provide a clear metric toward completion. When possible, milestones should be approximately equal in duration. Of course, this template should be adjusted as-needed.

He approaches the document slightly differently, but shares a similar sentiment. What does the application do? What application states high-level descriptions of core user scenarios will the user encounter?

For example, your UI description might look like:. There will always be details that neither of you had considered, and both you and the client will, while looking at the intermediate results, encounter new ideas, design changes, unexpected design flaws, and unworkable suggestions.

The design will evolve, and the changes should be captured in your document. Even then, I created a design document with detailed specifications, and adjusted it as necessary. Above all, keep in touch. At least several times a week, contact your client, report on your progress, ask for clarification, and make certain that you share identical visions. As a litmus test for your communication, try and ensure that you and your client give the same answers to these three questions:.

SDD stands for software design document or software design description. A functional design document describes a software product's capabilities, appearance, and functions it needs to ultimately perform.

Tutorials are lessons that take the reader by the hand through a series of steps to complete a project of some kind. They are what your project needs in order to show a beginner that they can achieve something with it.

How-to guides help users solve a real-world task using your software. Procida compares them to recipes in the sense that they are directions you give users so that they can successfully reach a certain goal. Unlike tutorials, which are aimed at complete beginners, how-to guides assume users already possess some basic knowledge of features, tools, and of how to perform simple tasks.

Reference guides are technical descriptions of the machinery and how to operate it. Developers tend to be quite good at writing it since they know all about their code and how to use it. Explanations are a deep dive into, or a discussion on, a particular topic you think is relevant to a higher-level understanding of your software. About explanations, Procida points out that —. This section of documentation is rarely explicitly created, and instead, snippets of explanation are scattered among other sections.

You could use some SEO techniques together with some marketing strategies so that as many users as possible can get hold of it. Most roadmapping tools provide templates for different roadmaps to let you start working with this document right away. Basically, all the tools offer free trials and paid plans with differences in templates, number of roadmaps, and people you can share them with.

The most popular tools for user experience design are prototyping tools that help create sketches, mock-ups, wireframes, and interactive prototypes:.

The process of creating API documentation is most often automated. Programmers or tech writers may write the documentation manually or use API documentation generators:. Professional tech writers often use specialized software for creating high-quality tech documentation. Such tools are called content management systems , or CMSs, and allow for easier building, organizing, and managing various documentation. A CMS can operate different file formats, import and store content, and let multiple users contribute to content development.

Some popular CMSs include:. Many of the tools described in the previous section provide a variety of templates for creating tech documentation. However, if your team is still struggling to find a qualitative template for some type of software documentation, here are more specialized sources to check out. The following sources provide a wide variety of templates related to software development and project management:. Downloadable templates might be harder to manage and collaborate on, but can still get you started quickly.

Here are some sources where you can find a number of roadmap templates:. Software design documents are sometimes also called product or technical specifications. You can adjust one of these templates to fit your needs:. Today, as more businesses prefer to migrate to the cloud, there are some well-known trusted providers that offer training and architecture samples to facilitate operating in their environments:.

There are several common practices that can be applied to all the major types of documentation we discussed above. You should find a balance between no documentation and excessive documentation. Poor documentation causes many errors and reduces efficiency in every phase of software product development.

At the same time, there is no need to provide an abundance of documentation and to repeat information in several papers. Only the most necessary and relevant information should be documented. Try to keep your documentation simple and reader friendly. It has to be logically structured and easily searchable, so include the table of contents. Avoid long blocks of text whenever possible and use visual content as it is easier to absorb information this way for most people.

You also have to remember who the document is written for. If it is for end-users, it definitely has to be written in plain language so that the readers are able to understand it without consulting the tech dictionary. However, if it is for your team tech specialists, make sure you provide all the accuracy and details they need to stick to the development plan and build the needed design and features. Use cross-links between documents, whether those are product pages or user guides.

Proper navigation through your documentation is important to give the reader the right understanding of a subject. Such practice can be considered user-flow, but for your project documentation. Documentation can be dedicated to internal or external usage. In the case of external documents, it is better to provide a clear explanation of every term, and its specific meaning in the project. Documentation should communicate ideas in clear language to set lingua franca between stakeholders, internal members, and users.

Proper maintenance is very important as documents that are outdated or inconsistent automatically lose their value. It is a good practice to establish some sort of maintenance and update schedule. You can either make it at regular intervals, i. Automated emails or release notes can help you follow the changes made by the development team.

You can also use a version control tool to manage this process more efficiently. It will let you track changes made, retain previous versions and drafts, and keep everyone aligned. The agile method is based on a collaborative approach to creating documentation. If you want to achieve efficiency, interview programmers and testers about the functionalities of the software.

Then, after you have written some documentation, share it with your team and get feedback. To get more information try to comment, ask questions, and encourage others to share their thoughts and ideas. Every team member can make a valuable contribution to the documents you produce. The person who generally does this job is called a technical writer. A tech writer with an engineering background can gather information from developers without requiring someone to explain in detail what is going on.

He or she will be able to take part in regular meetings and discussions. The agile methodology encourages engineering teams to always focus on delivering value to their customers. This key principle must also be considered in the process of producing software documentation. Good software documentation should be provided whether it is a software specifications document for programmers and testers or software manuals for end-users.

Comprehensive software documentation is specific, concise, and relevant. You should rather focus only on those documents that directly help achieve project objectives. Yes, I understand and agree to the Privacy Policy. You need to add documentation maintenance to your content. Put also troubleshooting guide and workflow to speed up resolution time by reducing time to find out source of the problem. Thanks for the advice, Sudiro! Hi all, as former software developer, software user documentation designer and now owning a Tech Communication company, I would suggest to include tools born to help the technical writer.

We meet a lot of companies that start the user documentation journey just with editors. Or with general-purpose tools. With those systems, you can build various publications starting from the same content.

High reuse of information. And you can easily manage multilingual user documentation. A very well constructed and informative article. I would also suggest that aspects of third-party solutions that make up the entire system be fully documented so there is no doubt about what makes up the entire solution, An aspect that I think is not covered so well as just how you bring all this together integrated with your database schema details in an organised and structured manner so that there … Read more ».

Furthermore, a software can have lots of features.. Thank you very much for your attention, this article is very useful!! Hi Giulia, thanks for the question! Keeping this process organized requires guidelines, timeframe, and frameworks. In reply to your second comment, UX documentation would also cover functionality points including the required features.

Estimates are created before the project starts and can be changed in the course of product development. But if a team is small, a project manager can write the documentation. Also, you can hire a technical writer to complete this task. In Software Architecture Documentation we list the four quadrants:.

Here are some more examples on how to use the projectdoc Toolbox to provide project relevant information. Developers may keep journals to track open questions and interesting findings. These journals may be open for all team members to find relevant information on project topics. Besides the individual journals the team may write a team journal to plan and run iterations or sprints. The Doctypes for Agile Planning provide templates for these communication needs.

Use Doctypes for Teamwork to define checklists, processes, patterns, tools, and rules a team agrees upon. Writing them down makes them accessible for anyone - especially for new team members. Keep these documents short and to the point! Doctypes for Project Management provides tools to communicate important project information with decisions, risks, open issues, and meeting minutes.

A glossary is helpful for most project and product documentations. Dependent on the intended audience this information is part of the product quadrant Q3, for users or system quadrant Q4, for the team working on the product. A project library collects relevant information for the project that is typically provided by external resources. These resources include books, website, blogs, or articles.

The library is especially helpful to provide information about the domain or technology stack for new team members. In order to create a glossary the team may need to do some domain crunching.

Create a separate space to collect all information relevant for the domain. Add things you learned about the domain that should be accessible beyond the scope of the current iteration or sprint of your team.

As long as the domain is explored, this information is part of a workspace that is not part of any quadrant. For the information that is relevant in the future, the topic space may be part of the product quadrant Q3, for users or system quadrant Q4, for the team working on the product dependent on the intended audience.

Some stakeholder need information for a given topic. In this case the team may create a workspace to collaborate to create the requested document.

After the information is delivered the space may be archived. This information, once moved to a topic space, is either part of the system quadrant Q4 , if the stakeholder is a team member , or of the product quadrant Q3 , if the stakeholder is a user. Products, especially technical products with powerful or complex interfaces, need documentation for their users.

Teams whose builds depend on Maven and that use automation heavily typically end up in writing their own plugins for Maven. Although these plugins are often only released for internal use, developers who employ these plugins need to have access to proper documentation. Teams using continuous deployment may choose to create libraries to modularize their code base. Each library is a product of its own with its own release cycle. Especially if the library is made public available, a sound and similar structure of the documentation helps developers to find information on how to use this library easily.

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