10 Project Document Best Practices

In the process of software development and maintenance, documents are essential data, which can improve the efficiency of software development, guarantee the quality of software, and have the function of guidance, help and dispel doubt in the process of software use. Especially in the maintenance work, the importance of the document is self-evident.

This article has sorted out the 10 best document writing practice in software development, hoping to be helpful to your work.

1. Writing documentation as an important part of development work(for example, 10% of the total development time). In software development, you can't have a document, but it's not appropriate to write a document that takes up most of the time. You can develop code documents, requirements Specification documents, design documents, test documents, user manuals, and so on as needed, and you can manage and share these documents through version control tools or web-based platforms when you are done.

2. The code document is very important。 The best way is to write "self-explanatory" code, variables, methods, classes, packages, and other names must be meaningful, the code flow must be clear. For very complex code snippets, you can include short comment lines. You can also add related tags or annotations to your code to automatically generate Javadoc documentation.

3.For future developers, you can prepare short, useful design documents for them,need to include key design features and UML diagrams without a large amount of unnecessary information。

4. Requirements/issues/undelivered project/Function point tracking document is also very important。 Using the tracking tool will make this work more efficient, and these tools can help you do things like quick Search, edit, and so on, and can generate plain text documents.

5. It is also important to test the tracking document。 You can use tools to record test scenarios and test results, along with a number of related requirements. This makes it easy to monitor the functional state of the software.

6.Documentation is an ongoing effort, and developers should update or regenerate the latest versions of these documents at any time until the development process is complete.If a document is not up to date, it is worthless。

7. For documents in the form of text, the version is very important。 Each new document must have a new version number (the version number is determined by the company's version management Policy), and this information needs to be recorded in the version tracking table for better tracking.

8. There is a unified document template。 The header, footer, title, and font size of the document must be consistent, which can enhance readability. can also do better, such as adding cover, table of contents, chart, glossary and so on.

9. Also need to pay attention to document format, the language used, typos, etc.。 Input errors, inconsistent table sizes, indentation, and so on May distract the reader's attention.

10. Record the lessons learned from the project and share them with others。 Developers may get some practical experience (such as architecture, code, configuration, etc.) in each project, and the experience information will not be in the standard development document. Developers need to accumulate and share these experiences, which may accelerate current development progress, and will be of great help in challenging work or repetitive work in the future.

English original: Software Documentation Best Practices