Docs and release notes are nobody's job.
Documentation is everyone’s priority until something more urgent comes along, which is always.
How it happens
Docs usually start when the company hires developers who have to learn the tribal knowledge from scratch, with no idea where the Chesterton’s fences are. When the team falls far enough behind, it hires a business analyst to document what’s new. The legacy of the application stays undocumented, technically and for its users.
The other moment is diligence. Facing an acquisition, software companies suddenly get to work on documentation. But a couple of million lines in, it’s an enormous job, and competing with everything else the team should be doing, it comes second, or seventh.
“The software isn’t the code, it’s the documentation, and the code is just the good or bad manifestation of what’s in the document.”
What it costs
- New hires who take months to become productive, and senior developers who spend their time explaining.
- Knowledge that lives in one person’s head, and leaves with them.
- Gaps a buyer’s diligence finds and prices in.
What does keeping the lights on cost your team? Run your numbers →
What the bench does
- V2Every pull request it opens includes the documentation for the change.
- V2Release notes drafted from what actually shipped.
- V2Documentation for existing code, drafted from the code itself, as pull requests your team reviews.
V1 watches, triages and files the issues. V2 also drafts the fixes and features as pull requests. Compare the editions →