An Infographic That Answers The Question: Why Working Software Is Better Than Comprehensive Documentation.
Programmers love to write documentation. Working software over comprehensive documentation Programmers hate to write documentation. Why? The answer is simple: nobody ever reads it! Well, almost nobody…
ideas for the introduction: maybe some statistics about how much time programmers spend writing docs and how many people actually read them would be useful
#company-culture
The term “documentation” is often seen as an anathema to the software developers, who are always under pressure to deliver and to do it right. Many times these pressures would force the developer to focus more on PMP ITTO ensuring that the software works than documenting how it does. While there have been many debates about which one is superior, the truth is that neither of them can exist without each other. The key question lies in striking a balance between them so that both documentation and working software are.
I’m a big believer in the idea that ‘working software is the best documentation.’ Documentation doesn’t need to be fancy, it just needs to be useful.
A great example of this is the documentation on Stripe’s homepage. It’s brief, easy to read, and right above the signup button. They know that if they can get you to sign up, they can sell you on the product and onboard you as a customer later.
Conclusion: Good documentation is important. It can help new users SEO get up to speed faster and reduce the amount of support tickets you need to answer. But when it comes to product development, there are a lot more factors in play than just how comprehensive your documentation is. A better question might be, if the software you’re working on isn’t where people want it yet, should you even bother documenting at all?
