Technical documentation for a software application




















In software development, technical documentation records all the processes throughout the SDLC. It also explains integrations, libraries, and software development kits SDK. The main goal of technical documentation is to make sure that developers and other stakeholders are on the same page. Thus, the document helps everyone involved in the project achieve the same objectives.

Technical documentation in software development is categorized into two main types: Product documentation and Process documentation. This type of documentation involves describing the product and instructions on how to perform tasks with it. For instance, product documentation includes project manuals , requirements, specifications, and business logic. There are two types under this type of documentation. User documentation is for end-users and system administrators.

Examples of these types are user guides, tutorials, and manuals such as installation, reference, and troubleshooting. Some examples are:. This documentation aims to help the end-users. These are documents that provide instructions, whether in print, online, or offline. These guides need to be precise and easy to understand. In addition, well-written end-user documentation will help provide the best user experience. Usually, this document contains information that will help in product maintenance, such as installation and updates.

The standard contents for this record are:. Technical documentation is usually either written by a subject matter expert i.

Every technical writing project starts with research. It might sound obvious, but knowing the purpose and scope of your technical documentation beforehand will save you a ton of time and energy and headaches.

The goal of any technical documentation is to be usable. And a huge part of that is making it structurally logical and easy to navigate. Before you even get into creating content, you need to think about how that content is going to be presented. Have you ever flipped through a user manual or opened a help document and instantly knew it was bad? In most cases, this means using some sort of template or schema a blueprint of how your data will be constructed.

For example, your technical documentation template might look something like this:. Not only will keeping things organized like this help your users find information more quickly, but it will let you know if you have all the information you need to keep your content consistent.

Your project as a whole also needs to be organized in a way that makes sense and can be quickly parsed. What are the main topics that people will be searching for? Under each of those, what specific questions or documents will they be looking for? Reference guides are technical descriptions of the machinery and how to operate it.

Developers tend to be quite good at writing it since they know all about their code and how to use it. Explanations are a deep dive into, or a discussion on, a particular topic you think is relevant to a higher-level understanding of your software.

About explanations, Procida points out that —. This section of documentation is rarely explicitly created, and instead, snippets of explanation are scattered among other sections.

You could use some SEO techniques together with some marketing strategies so that as many users as possible can get hold of it. Also, what you put in your docs should be organized into a structure that makes searching for specific information a breeze. Steve Konves recommends you structure your docs in a singly linked tree: starting from the root node, which should be placed in an obvious location for every interested user to discover, all other items can be easily accessed.

Doing so will decrease the time you spend helping users, but it will also give you a clearer idea of the kind of information users need most frequently so that you can document them first and keep them in a prominent place in your docs. Easily accessing your software documentation is great, but if users find out that its content is out of date or the sample code or instructions lead to buggy results, this gets frustrating, to say the least.

Still, Steve Konves suggests you keep your docs close to the code — for instance, in source control. 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.

You can either make it at regular intervals, i. Automated emails or release notes can help you follow the changes made by the development team. You can also use a version control tool to manage this process more efficiently. It will let you track changes made, retain previous versions and drafts, and keep everyone aligned.

The agile method is based on a collaborative approach to creating documentation. If you want to achieve efficiency, interview programmers and testers about the functionalities of the software. Then, after you have written some documentation, share it with your team and get feedback. To get more information try to comment, ask questions, and encourage others to share their thoughts and ideas.

Every team member can make a valuable contribution to the documents you produce. The person who generally does this job is called a technical writer. A tech writer with an engineering background can gather information from developers without requiring someone to explain in detail what is going on.

He or she will be able to take part in regular meetings and discussions. The agile methodology encourages engineering teams to always focus on delivering value to their customers. This key principle must also be considered in the process of producing software documentation. Good software documentation should be provided whether it is a software specifications document for programmers and testers or software manuals for end-users.

Comprehensive software documentation is specific, concise, and relevant. You should rather focus only on those documents that directly help achieve project objectives. Yes, I understand and agree to the Privacy Policy. You need to add documentation maintenance to your content. Put also troubleshooting guide and workflow to speed up resolution time by reducing time to find out source of the problem.

Thanks for the advice, Sudiro! Hi all, as former software developer, software user documentation designer and now owning a Tech Communication company, I would suggest to include tools born to help the technical writer. We meet a lot of companies that start the user documentation journey just with editors. Or with general-purpose tools. With those systems, you can build various publications starting from the same content. High reuse of information.

And you can easily manage multilingual user documentation. A very well constructed and informative article. I would also suggest that aspects of third-party solutions that make up the entire system be fully documented so there is no doubt about what makes up the entire solution, An aspect that I think is not covered so well as just how you bring all this together integrated with your database schema details in an organised and structured manner so that there … Read more ».

Furthermore, a software can have lots of features.. Thank you very much for your attention, this article is very useful!!

Hi Giulia, thanks for the question! Keeping this process organized requires guidelines, timeframe, and frameworks. In reply to your second comment, UX documentation would also cover functionality points including the required features. Estimates are created before the project starts and can be changed in the course of product development.



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