You'll also get three bonus ebooks completely free! Try It Free Now. Leave a comment: Cancel comment Name required :. Email address required :. Website URL :. Speak your mind :. Reports reflect how time and human resources were used during development. They can be generated on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Consult our article on agile delivery metrics to learn more about process documents such as velocity chats, sprint burndown charts, and release burndown charts. Working papers. The majority of process documents are specific to the particular moment or phase of the process.
As a result, these documents quickly become outdated and obsolete. But they still should be kept as part of development because they may become useful in implementing similar tasks or maintenance in the future. Also, process documentation helps to make the whole development more transparent and easier to manage. The main goal of process documentation is to reduce the amount of system documentation.
In order to achieve this, write the minimal documentation plan. List the key contacts, release dates, and your expectations with assumptions.
Product roadmaps are used in Agile software development to document vision, strategy, and overall goals of the project. Roadmaps are used as process documents to keep the course of development in sync with initial goals. Depending on the type of product roadmap, it can express high-level objectives, prioritization of tasks, the sprint timeline, or low-level details.
A strategic roadmap is a high-level strategic document, that contains overall information on the project. Strategic roadmaps usually state a vision and long-term goals. In the case of agile product development, a roadmap can be arranged in themes. Themes are multiple tasks that a team must complete and are somehow connected. Grouping the information around the themes makes a roadmap highly flexible and updatable, which is a great fit for sprint-based development.
The best advice concerning strategic roadmapping is to include only important information. Otherwise, you risk turning your roadmap into a clumsy scheme, difficult to both understand and maintain. Source: productplan. A technology roadmap or IT roadmap is a low-level document that describes technical requirements and the means of technology implementation.
IT roadmaps are quite detailed. They contain the information on each deliverable, explaining the reason for such a decision. Source: hutwork. A release plan is used to set strict time limits for releases. A release plan should focus on the actual deadlines without specifying release details.
It is highly recommended to use roadmap specific tools to create your own roadmaps. Online tools like Roadmunk provide various templates for product roadmaps, allow quick editing, and provide easy sharing across all team members.
Keep in mind, that a roadmap, depending on its type, can be a product document that states requirements. It also describes the process and guides your team through development. There are countless collaborative tools for software development teams. Those can help to state requirements, share information, and document features and processes:. As software documentation is easier to be used on the web, it has to be created in a proper format. Markup is used on GitHub and Reddit, and basically everywhere for web-based documentation.
So, here are some Markdown editors that can be useful for creating documents for your project:. 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. Write the Docs is a global community of people who care about documentation. We have a Slack community, conferences on 3 continents, and local meetups!
Quick search. While you write, the idea morphs in your head. A simple interruption can cause the idea to lose what focus it has. You start thinking about the program as a whole instead of thinking of just the function that you are working on, and the function starts to take on responsibilities that it should have nothing to do with.
Suppose that you test the function and find that it does not work. So you need to fix it. But during the process of fixing it, you have nothing but your memory telling you want the function is supposed to do. It is difficult to keep that in your head along with the details of how the function is supposed to work, and the process of fixing a function definition takes the function further away from its original intent.
Later, when you need to use that function, you have forgotten just what it does. Unwilling to reverse-engineer it, you make a guess based on what you remember. You often forget important details, and your software does not work because of it. You are faced with laborious debugging to find out what is going on. You might have heard of "self-documenting code". The idea is for functions to be written in a readable form so that, to find out what a function does, you just read the function's definition.
For very small pieces of software that can be achieved. But imagine a larger piece of software, say with about functions. Such software is built up function upon function; one function typically uses a few others that are defined in the same collection of functions, with the exception of the bottom-level functions that only use the library.
Suppose that the software has no internal documentation, and relies on "self-documenting code". Now you want to understand what a particular function does. But it uses 3 other undocumented functions, so you need to understand what they do first.
Each of those uses 2 undocumented functions, so you must read their definitions too. It goes on and on. You find yourself reading thousands of lines of code to understand a single function whose body is only ten lines long.
The only way that anyone can work with undocumented software is to reverse-engineer the whole thing and add documentation that should have been written by the developer. Most of the time, that is too difficult. Undocumented software is often just thrown away as unmaintainable. Having trouble in finding the notes for your syllabus?
0コメント