Out of all the projects I’ve worked on both individual and group, the last and final step seems to be documentation. A lot of times it gets overlooked. When the deadlines approach the product manager wants to get a working product. What a lot of people don’t realize is software documentation takes a substantial amount of time to write. It is very important to keep track of the software. Marketing individuals won’t actually see changes in the product in the time it takes to write documentation and that seems to make it less important in the overall product.
Over the past few weeks versioning systems such as CVS or Subversion have become an integral part of projects. It keeps things in order and makes sure that multiple individuals are on the same page. It is also an effective way of backing up work and seeing what changed in order to debug software. Versioning software is only a part of documentation however.
Comments in code are a very important part of documentation and in some of the software I evaluate some people do a decent job while others do no. On top of commenting code, a read me file and manual are important. These have to be written so the average user can pick it up and know how to use the software. This is hard for some programmers because they have a programming mentality and often explain things that only other programmers will understand.
Avangate has a post about product documentation that is pretty good in getting things started. Some of the things I have mentioned above, but they go into much more detail in some of the parts. It’s a good first read and will hopefully get the ball rolling.
