SitePoint A Guide to Writing Your First Software Documentation As a developer, your pride and joy is your code. It’s readable, it meets DRY principles, it reflects best practices, and the end product is a great tool that solves some kind of problem for its target users. However, no matter how much work you’ve put into your code, if your software comes with no documentation, or you write documentation as an afterthought and treat it with little importance, it’s likely users will find little joy in working with it, and eventually opt for a different, more user-friendly product. In this article, you’ll find a number of practical guiding principles to get you up and running with writing your first software documentation. Why Documentation Is Important In reference to your software, Mike Pope has a fitting saying that goes like this: If it isn’t documented, it doesn’t exist. Why’s that? Well, just to take my personal experience as an example, I was browsing the Web looking for
