What if your engineers knew exactly where to find information?
What if they could go to a centralized place when they have a question or need to review documentation?
Let’s say that Joel needs to spin up an API while creating a POC for a new feature.
He doesn’t have a lot of time and needs to get it up and running quickly.
How should he start?
He has never done this for your company before, he asks around but doesn’t get a clear answer on what tech stack he should use.
He defaults to his previous experience (and the internet) and builds what he needs.
He chose Spring to build it.
He moves it from POC to full blown application as the sole developer. It’s functionality has grown and is really beneficial to the business.
Fast forward 2 years and Joel has left the company.
How do you maintain that API?
Hopefully it isn’t too critical to the business by now…
You’d better hope you have a Java developer around.
If you don’t, you have a fat new hunk of tech debt.
Congratulations!
Does this sound far fetched? It happens more than you’d think.
Perhaps its even happened in your organization?
Was there was a mad dash to migrate that tech debt to a supported model?
Before all of this happened, Joel was indifferent, he just wanted to get started.
If there were clear and opinionated documentation, this could have been avoided.
Its actually quite simple to implement and costs almost nothing.
Why is quality documentation so rare inside IT organizations?
Something to think about…
Best,
Andre