Unfortunately, software documentation is greatly overlooked. Whether you're producing documentation for users or developers, it will ultimately provide them with comprehensive information and get their questions answered. You'll save time that would otherwise be spent answering the same questions over and over again. Once you get into the habit of putting together software documentation, it'll help your project's and business's overall organization a great deal.
Consistent documentation helps project teams establish solid workflows by building effective habits and producing reference documents that can be checked throughout the lifecycle of your software product and beyond. As your project moves through different phases, you'll likely need to bring new faces onboard. Software documentation will help new programmers and developers get oriented quickly, allowing them to get to work and start contributing right away.
No one person is a master of everything. Keeping effective software documentation on a collaborative platform like Slite allows people to work together and unite their strengths. One person might be a source code and html expert, while another might know everything about usability, wireframes and UML diagrams. Effective software documentation means that team members can bring their top skills to the table and fill in their knowledge gaps by referring to others' contributions.
Save time in your next software development process and take advantage of Slite's free software documentation template. We're passionate about helping teams collaborate and produce incredible work together. Don't waste time sifting through files and wikis to find lost Excel sheets, Microsoft Word documents and screenshots. Keep all the essential information you need in one place by customizing our templates to meet your needs.
They're free, look great and are easy for anyone to use. If you're ready to go, take these first steps towards assembling excellent software documentation. Begin by:. Think of your audience as your home page: you have to start from there. Determining whether you're producing documentation for users, developers or both from the get-go is absolutely key. Build this testing phase into your Agile process so that team members leave time to test before the product or feature ships. You also need to include a phase where the relevant members of the product or engineering team review your documentation to check for technical accuracy, so this is where strong relationships between teams come in very handy.
Make sure you formalize your process to ensure all team members appreciate the importance of the documentation. Closing the customer feedback loop is all part of the Agile process. Agile development should be continuous communication between the development team and the customer, at all stages of the process.
From beta testing with a research group, to feedback on the first release, and ongoing feedback from customers, you need to keep your finger on the pulse. Closing the feedback loop means connecting the feedback with the right internal department. If customer support gets an issue with the software, this needs to be passed on to the engineering team and logged as a bug or a feature request.
You absolutely need a style guide for your software documentation, just like you would for your marketing activities. The main things you should cover in your style guide are:. For advice on grammatical choices, such as whether to use the Oxford Comma, you can check standard style guides such as the Chicago Manual of Style. Adopt a coherent writing style, especially if you are using teams of writers who all write in different styles. This all adds to the User Experience of the documentation, which we will discuss later.
And you can either make them yourself, search online, or find them in enterprise content tools like Atlassian Confluence. You will need to consider the User Experience UX of your documentation, especially customer-facing help content. Just writing the content is half the battle — how do customers feel when they encounter your knowledge base?
Are they able to easily find what they need? If you invest in the proper knowledge base software like Helpjuice, you will have built-in templates with UX designed just for documentation users. Information Architecture refers to:. When you get to a certain point in your documentation, you need to seriously consider how people with different needs will be able to use your documentation.
For example, consider whether your users are from international audiences when actually writing content. You want to avoid the use of idioms and references that they might not understand. Accessibility relates to the User Experience of the documentation tool itself. For example, consider whether it will be accessible to a person using a screen reader, which will read the test aloud to a person using it. Images with text overlaid are not accessible, so think about your screenshots and make sure they have accompanying text.
Take into consideration the contrasting colors of your knowledge base design, and how you style links, to ensure other users with visual impairments can engage with your site successfully. Take this example from Write the Docs' website:. The site design is very clear, easy to use, with underlined links and short paragraphs. The black and white color scheme provides a high contrast for visually impaired users.
Consider how customers arrive at your knowledge base in the first place. Very few customers will consider your knowledge base as a whole, and hardly anyone will arrive at your carefully constructed homepage.
Wherever you dip your toe into the Web, that is your page one. Whether you are a reader or a writer, and whether you like it or not, that is the way the Web works. Every page is page one. Your software documentation is no good if nobody can find it, but there are a number of ways to promote your content. Your knowledge base software should be indexable by search engines, with all the correct meta tags.
You should also link to your documentation from your software app, since this is where users will naturally get stuck. If possible, make use of contextual help which is served up whenever customers need it. For example, if customers are having trouble with their billing, ensure a link takes them to a page with billing documentation that can help solve their problem. To deliver the documentation to your users, you need the appropriate software documentation tool.
Knowledge base software like Helpjuice enables you to easily create and publish documentation in a stylish website optimized for search and discovery. This can even mean creating entirely new knowledge bases and maintaining several KBs for different versions of the product.
Helpjuice allows you to create different versions of your documentation and even switch between them in the editor. Many companies need to keep different versions of their documentation live at the same time for customers who are using different releases.
Keeping track of your documentation tasks in collaboration tools like Asana or Trello is also essential. Whatever your tool, make sure everyone is using it for maximum productivity. Consider whether you want to work in a lightweight markup language. One of the advantages of working in a lightweight markup language is that content can be easily styled and presented in a visually appealing way.
It usually consists of the requirements document, architecture design, source code, validation docs, verification and testing info, and a maintenance or help guide.
A product requirement document or PRD provides information about system functionality. Generally, requirements are the statements of what a system should do. It contains business rules, user stories, use cases, etc. The best practice is to write a requirement document using a single, consistent template that all team members adhere to.
The one web-page form will help you keep the document concise and save the time spent on accessing the information. Technical documentation example: One web-page software requirements document created by using Atlassian Confluence , the content collaboration software.
User experience design begins at the requirements stage and proceeds through all the stages of development, including the testing and post-release stages.
The process of UX design includes research, prototyping, usability testing, and the actual designing part, during which lots of documentation and deliverables are produced. User Personas are created and documented during the research stage. The information gathered during user interviews and surveys is compiled into functional user persona documents.
User personas represent the key characteristics of real users, focusing on behavior, thought patterns, and motivation. A user scenario is a document that describes the steps a user persona will take to accomplish a specific task. User scenarios focus on what a user will do, rather than outlining the thought process. The set of scenarios can be either visual or narrative, and describe the existing scenarios or future functionality.
Scenario maps are used to compile the existing user scenarios into a single document. Scenario maps show all possible scenarios available at a given moment. The main purpose of a scenario map is to depict all the possible scenarios for every single function, as well as intersecting scenario steps. A user story map is formed from the backlog of the product. This type of document helps to arrange the user stories into future functions or parts of the application.
A user story map can be a scheme, or a table of user stories grouped in a particular order to denote the required functions for a certain sprint. Source: feedotter. The UX style guide is a document that includes the design patterns for the future product. It also describes all possible UI elements and content types used, defining the rules of how they should be arranged and work with each other. On the stage of prototyping and designing , a UX designer often works with the deliverables and updates documentation on par with other team members, including product owner, UI designers, and development team.
The most common documents produced at these stages are:. Creating a site map is a part of arranging the information architecture. Source: uxforthemasses. User flow or user journey schemes help the team to map the steps a user should take through the whole product. The main task of a user flow scheme is to depict the possible steps a user may take, going from page to page. Usually, the scheme includes all the pages, sections, buttons, and functions they provide to show the logic of user movement.
Source: medium. Wireframes are the blueprints for future UI. Basically, wireframes are the schemes that show how to arrange the elements on the page and how they should behave. A mock-up is the next product design stage, showing the actual look and feel of a product.
Basically, mock-ups are static images representing the final product design. A prototype is a mock-up that you can interact with: click some buttons, navigate between different pages, and so on. A prototype can be created in a prototyping tool like Sketch or MockFlow. Using templates, UX designers can create interactive mock-ups on the early stages of development to be employed for usability testing.
A usability testing report is a short-form feedback document created to communicate the results of usability testing. The report should be as short as possible, with visual examples prevailing over text. Software architecture design documents, sometimes also called technical specifications, include the main architectural decisions made by the solution architect.
Unlike the product requirement document mentioned above that describes what needs to be built, the architecture design documentation is about how to build it.
It has to describe in what way each product component will contribute to and meet the requirements, including solutions, strategies, and methods to achieve that. So, the software design document gives an overview of the product architecture, determines the full scope of work, and sets the milestones, thus, looping in all the team members involved and providing the overall guidance.
An effective design and architecture document comprises the following information sections:. Overview and background. Briefly describe the main goals of the project, what problems you are trying to solve, and the results you want to achieve.
Underline the guiding architecture and design principles with which you will engineer the product. User Story description. Connect user stories with associated business processes and related scenarios. You should try to avoid technical details in this section. Solution details. Describe the contemplated solution by listing planned services, modules, components, and their importance. Diagrammatic representation of the solution.
Source: docs. That will help organize the work process and provide a clear metric to monitor progress. A source code document is a technical section that explains how the code works. The main users of the source code documents are software engineers.
Try to keep the document simple by making short sections for each element and supporting them with brief descriptions. There are different types of user acceptance testing in agile.
We have outlined the most common:. A quality management plan is an analog of a requirement document dedicated to testing. This document sets the required standard for product quality and describes the methods to achieve this level. The plan helps to schedule QA tasks and manage testing activity for product managers, but, it is mainly used for large-scale projects.
A test strategy is a document that describes the software testing approach to achieve testing objectives. This document includes information about team structure and resource needs along with what should be prioritized during testing. A test strategy is usually static as the strategy is defined for the entire development scope. A test plan usually consists of one or two pages and describes what should be tested at a given moment.
This document should contain:. A test case specifications document is a set of detailed actions to verify each feature or functionality of a product. Usually, a QA team writes a separate specifications document for each product unit. Test case specifications are based on the approach outlined in the test plan. A good practice is to simplify specifications description and avoid test case repetitions. Test checklist is a list of tests that should be run at a particular time.
It represents what tests are completed and how many have failed. All points in the test checklists should be defined correctly. Try to group test points in the checklists. This approach will help you keep track of them during your work and not lose any. If it helps testers to check the app correctly, you can add comments to your points on the list.
This document should describe known problems with the system and their solutions. It also should represent the dependencies between different parts of the system. Their documentation informs developers how to effectively use and connect to the required APIs. API documentation is a deliverable produced by technical writers as tutorials and guides.
This type of documentation should also contain the list of all available APIs with specs for each one. As the name suggests, user documentation is created for product users. However, their categories may also differ.
So, you should structure user documentation according to the different user tasks and different levels of their experience. Generally, user documentation is aimed at two large categories:. The documentation created for end-users should explain in the simplest way possible how the software can help solve their problems. Such user instructions can be provided in the printed form, online, or offline on a device. Here are the main types of the user documents:. The complete manual includes exhaustive information and instructions on how to install and operate the product.
It lists the hardware and software requirements, detailed description of the features and full guidelines on how to get the most out of them, example inputs and outputs, possible tips and tricks, etc. The troubleshooting guide gives end-users information on how to find and resolve possible issues that might arise when using the product. For a detailed overview, check our article dedicated to user documentation.
Some parts of user documentation, such as tutorials and onboarding, in many large customer-based products are replaced with onboarding training.
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