If a tree falls on a Deserted Island and no one documents it, does it make a noise?
Channel: Deserted Island TV
Date: 2021-05-04

This talk was presented at Deserted Island DevOps 2021 on April 30th, 2021. You can learn more about our event at https://desertedisland.club.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction
01:19 Talk Begins
16:31 Speaker Q&A


Talk Abstract
One of the biggest hurdles that documentation writers face in maintaining documentation is staying on top of everything as it changes. We need to know what’s going on in the organization to be aware of pending changes to the code, so we’re not blindsided by code changes that may break documentation links, and cause docs to be incorrect or outdated. Sometimes it can feel like we’re just trying to catch up with what everyone else has done, which can be exhausting and frustrating. Devops teams tend to move fast and break things, and that doesn’t always work with how technical writers want to operate.

Ideally, engineers would update the documentation as they update code or add functionality, or work with you to update them as the coded feature is being worked on, but that doesn’t always happen. Additionally, the documentation team often has a better grasp of what is important to document for the end user, and is the team that bridges the knowledge gap between the engineers and the end users.

In this talk, we’ll go over strategies for keeping your documentation up to date when you have many engineers and fewer documentation writers.