Technical Documentation in Software Development

Written guidelines are indispensable for any device, project, or other undertaking. Before you start your engineering endeavor, a dedicated software development team should outline all the envisaged tasks in order to have a clear plan and track progress. Generally, this is what technical documentation for software deals with. 

To be more specific, the term includes all written materials connected with software solution development. Technical documentation of software projects allows all stakeholders to remain on the same page, control project fulfillment, and secure project goals.

This article overviews the types of software technical documentation and its significance for businesses and offers recommendations on how to create projects’ written materials properly.

What Is Technical Documentation with Regard to Software?

So, what is software documentation? In a nutshell, it’s vital regardless of the project scope. It encompasses various types of materials created throughout the software development life cycle (SDLC), from the solution’s purpose to the complete architecture. Documentation is intended to consolidate all project-related information, describe product functionality, and enable discussions of all crucial questions among engineers and stakeholders.

The goals of software development documentation include:

• Consolidation of the relevant data
• Preventing delays due to potential issues
• A comprehensive explanation of the solution
• Guidance for project development and related discussions

Since technical documentation for software is split into several types, it can be composed by various specialists, from tech experts to project managers. You can conceive a very complex product and employ a software development service, but the documentation should be as clear and concise as possible. 

The Role of Technical Documentation in SDLC: Why it’s Important in Software Development

Documentation in SDLC aims to make everyone’s life easier throughout the project life cycle. Its importance for a software company is hard to overestimate for several reasons.

Streamlined Decision Making 

Quick and easy access to the actual technical information helps a product team speed up the decision-making process. With the unified data source, team members don’t have to search continually for the information they need. Instead, they can immediately consult the required documents to create the proper background for efficient decisions. 

Contextual Help for Users

Documentation that’s displayed within the solution is exceptionally convenient to customers. It allows them to remove arising issues while staying in context, thereby enhancing usability and customer experience.

Additional Marketing Opportunities

Comprehensive software development documentation can facilitate advertising since it provides detailed information about the product. By presenting your prospects with all of your solution’s characteristics and features, you simplify their path toward making a purchase decision.

Simplified Tech Support

If users encounter technical issues, they can consult technical documentation to solve them, thus reducing the number of tech support calls. This, in turn, reduces expenses on technical support and improves customer experience since many users prefer to solve issues themselves without waiting for someone to help them.

Storing Developer Ideas

Documentation in software development can record ideas related to your software solution at all stages of the project life cycle. You can get back to them every time you might want to implement changes to your product and find a valuable source of insights.

Roadmap for Further Projects

Your tech documentation sets benchmarks for your future projects, displaying your plans, goals, and essential product features. This helps consolidate the team around a single common goal.

Smooth Communication

Since documentation records all information about the product, it becomes a vital form of communication. Project stakeholders and software developers have quick and easy access to critical data without contacting each other directly. Documentation also accumulates knowledge for further projects and decisions.

Challenges of Software Documentation

Along with all the possible benefits, the process of creating software documentation must be approached thoughtfully. Otherwise, your project team risks wasting a lot of time on a procedure that will not produce the expected results.

Complexity

It’s crucial that even inexperienced users can master your software with the help of your documentation. This is usually achieved through close interaction between specialists who were directly involved in the development of the software solution and technical copywriters who can present information in a well-structured manner and simplify the understanding of complex technological concepts for the average reader. In general, proper documentation structure and conciseness are the keys to overcoming this challenge. So before releasing it, make sure that it fully meets these two parameters.

Mismatched Expectations of Different User Groups

It can be difficult for project teams to balance technical depth with clarity for different user groups (e.g. developers and stakeholders). Indeed, the same documentation may need to serve different purposes, from detailed guides for developers to high-level overviews for managers. Therefore, adapting it for all groups can be a challenge.

Time Consumption

Writing detailed and understandable documentation always takes a lot of time, which may be in short supply when there are other project tasks at hand. Therefore, tight deadlines and project pressures can de-prioritize documentation, resulting in insufficient detail. That’s why, to overcome this challenge, your team will need to plan the project timeline wisely and start creating documentation from the very beginning.

Keeping Documentation Up to Date

Since your project will constantly evolve—your development team will fix bugs, enrich it with new features, optimize its performance, and so on—the documentation must be developed and updated according to these changes. However, cases where documentation lags behind development are still quite common—this is especially true for large projects with several participants and frequent updates. Therefore, you may need one more specialist (specifically, an engineer who updates the system state) whose responsibility will be to keep the documentation up to date.

Documentation Inconsistency

Without clear documentation guidelines and standards, different team members may document inconsistently. In particular, due to the lack of universal templates, teams may struggle to produce consistent and understandable documents. Therefore, the project team should have a pre-prepared template for all types of software being built.

Fast Pace of New Releases

At first glance, creating documentation may seem like a minor task, but it still requires a lot of resources. At the same time, you may experience their limitation if the product is updated very often or the development environment changes quickly. In such situations, developers always prioritize releasing a new version of the project on time rather than leaving important notes necessary to develop comprehensive documentation. In this case, you will need to first explain to all project participants (especially stakeholders) how much of a priority the task of creating high-quality documentation is and try to reserve the necessary resources for this.

How Software Development Documentation Accompanies Every Stage of the Development Process

Technical documentation in SDLC embraces the key steps of the process:

Planning 

This stage includes marketing research aimed at determining the viability of a solution. The respective documentation should help explain to developers which functions and services would attract the target audience most and how to construct those features.

Analysis

Based on user requirements, stakeholders formulate technical specifications and set up tasks, terms, and test parameters.

Design

This is where project managers and architects come into play. The documentation at this stage includes the distribution of responsibilities, budget, timeline, tech stack, architectural design, project limitations, and risk levels.

Development and Implementation

Here, developers make code scripts according to the product specifications and requirements.

Testing

The finished software undergoes testing procedures to reveal bugs and check whether all functional and non-functional requirements are complied with and the performance matches users’ expectations.

Deployment and Support

The IT department tracks and maintains software functionality after release to guarantee that the performance meets key indicators.

Types of Software Documentation

Software engineering documentation acts as a lighthouse on the development path. Its fundamental goal is to ensure that all parties share a common vision and move in the same direction to attain the project goals.

Software engineering documents hold multifaceted purposes. From the customer’s standpoint, they help use the solution properly. From the development team’s standpoint, they provide unified information required for effective work. From a marketing standpoint, they help promote the product by explaining how it addresses the users’ needs.

Based on the comprehensive nature of software development documentation, it is divided into two essential groups:

• Product documentation describes a software solution.
• Process documentation states the entire development process and provides all complementary data.

The major types of software documentation can be represented in the following way:

Let’s explore the types of software documentation in more detail.

Product Documentation

Documents from this category describe the solution and provide guidelines for working with it. Generally, documentation covers manuals, tech specifications, requirements, business logic, and more. The group is subdivided into:

• System documentation is focused on internal users, such as product owners, software engineers, and business representatives. It describes the system and its parts and includes requirements, architecture design descriptions, program source code, and more. 
• User documentation is directed at customers and system administrators. It consists of manuals, installation guides, tutorials, troubleshooting guides, and more.

Now, let’s delve deeper into each type of software product documentation.

System Documentation

System documents deliver information about the whole system to software engineers and stakeholders, helping them comprehend the underlying technology. The documentation typically includes, but is not limited to, the description of requirements, architecture design, source code, quality assurance, testing reports, and a maintenance guide.

When composing documents, you can use technical documentation examples or technical documentation templates that are generally available. We will go through the essential characteristics of the main system document types.

Product Requirements

This section collects data about system functionality. Simply put, it describes what the system should do. This type of software development document also contains such general information as business rules and use cases. Its primary purpose is to state the product’s goal, functions, features, behavior, and maintenance.

The best practice is to adhere to a consistent software product documentation template that is unified for all team members. This is the optimal way to save everyone’s time and keep the software product document concise.

UX Design

Software engineers work on the user experience design throughout all the stages of SDLC. The process encompasses research, prototyping, usability checks, and design itself. Every part requires respective documentation and deliverables.

API Development

API documentation is intended for developers integrating with a specific API. This document should contain comprehensive recommendations on how to perform the integration and also what this API can be used for. This documentation also has to include an explanation of how authentication is performed (via API keys, OAuth tokens, etc.), descriptions of supported endpoints (including the HTTP method, endpoint URL, and other parameters), supported request format (for example, JSON, XML, etc.) and return response format, key request parameters and restrictions, API response codes and their meanings, error handling guidance, speed limits, links to SDKs and libraries that simplify integration, recommendations for security, version control guidelines, real examples of integration, and contact information for developers.

Software Architecture Design

While this type of software project documentation explains what needs to be developed, the architecture design documents describe how to construct it. Also regarded as tech specifications, these documents comprise a software engineer’s fundamental architectural decisions. The documentation overviews the product architecture, outlines the scope of work, and establishes the milestones. It explains how each product component will help the solution match the requirements and guides all team members in their choice of methods and strategies. Utilize technical documentation templates for architecture design to include all the necessary constituents.

Quality Assurance

QA engineers test user acceptance in different ways. Here are several common testing techniques:

• Quality management plan sets quality standards and the methods to achieve them. It aims to manage the whole testing activity and is mainly used for large-scale projects.
• Test strategy describes the testing approach, including the team structure, resources, and testing priorities.
• Test plan outlines what should be tested at a specific moment.
• Test case specifications list the detailed actions to check each product feature.
• Test checklists represent the range of tests to be presented and indicate which tests were completed and which failed.

Maintenance and Help Guide

These guides should provide usage recommendations and troubleshooting advice. The document also describes the dependencies between various parts of the system.

Customer Documentation

This group of product documents is directed at solution users. Users, in turn, are subdivided into user personas as well, since they may have different tasks and skill levels. The user documentation correspondingly splits into two big groups: end-users and system administrators.

End-user Documentation

In a nutshell, end-user documentation should clearly explain how the solution can help address user’s issues. Such guidelines may come in various forms:

• The start guide has basic instructions and the product’s functionality description.
• The comprehensive manual contains thorough information on installation and running the product.
• The troubleshooting guide provides recommendations on how to reveal and fix potential issues with the product.
• Online assistance may come in the form of video tutorials, support portals, and FAQs.

System Administrators’ Documentation

Since system administrators are advanced software users, they don’t need instructions on how to operate the software. Docs for this group of users typically encompass the essential points of installation and updates. The standard system administrators’ documents include:

• Functional description presents the solution’s functionalities.
• System admin guide describes different system behaviors in different environments and interoperability with other systems. It also includes instructions on how to handle malfunction situations.

Process Documentation

This software technical documentation branch includes all the activities connected with product development. Thanks to the properly organized process documentation, all development phases become transparent and easily manageable. Process documents are specific to each project stage and have particular goals. Basically, they do the following:

• Accompany every product development phase with actual data
• Simplify the software development procedures for all stakeholders
• Minimize the amount of system documentation

Common software documentation types include:

Work Plans, Schedules, and Estimates

Every project starts with the planning stage. The respective documentation allows managers to allocate tasks and resources, with the opportunity to make changes according to the product evolution.

Reports and Metrics 

Without tracking and measuring progress, you’ll hardly achieve outstanding results. Reports demonstrate how resources were used at each stage, while metrics help assess the effects and determine whether the goals at each stage were attained. 

Working Papers 

Working papers are convenient tools for collecting software engineers’ ideas throughout the project life cycle. These docs can include certain information about code, sketches, and potential solutions to technical issues. They allow for storing valuable project details, which can be helpful throughout product development.

Standards 

This part contains exhaustive coding and user experience standards that the team should comply with during project implementation.

Most of the process documentation relates to specific project phases, meaning that the documents may quickly run out of date. However, they should be carefully stored since they can aid in performing similar tasks, troubleshooting, and maintenance in the future.

The main goal of process documentation is to lower the amount of system documentation created. Therefore, you should create a minimal documentation plan and make your writing concise.

Step-by-step Guide to Developing Software Engineering Documentation to Streamline the Project Life Cycle

Here are the three main things you should avoid when creating software documentation:

• Excessive information
• Unstructured information
• Insufficient information

Let us help you structure the preparation process by providing several recommendations on producing effective technical software documentation and securing the software development life cycle.

Establish Communication Channels

Communication is the milestone of any project. Thoughtfully planned, efficient communication makes a conducive and friendly environment for enhanced cooperation. Moreover, frequent interactions between team members help avoid numerous issues and misunderstandings.

When selecting channels for communication, you should ensure that all team members and stakeholders are involved. This may require remote collaboration, so include the most convenient and effective means.

We can suggest live meetings, video meetings, management dashboards, emails, messengers, and online communication platforms.

Before you kick off the project, work out a detailed agreement on appropriate communication channels and format so that all parties can contribute to a fruitful development process.

Analyze Business Requirements and Shape Project Vision

A stellar solution starts with a clear understanding of what a software engineering company is going to deliver and what a customer will get in the outcome. Developers should achieve alignment between what they design, what the client needs, and what they will eventually construct.

The recipe defines a holistic project vision and goals based on customer expectations and pain points. Together with the stakeholder requirements, this information constitutes the basis for documentation in software development.

Record User Requirements and Study Use Cases

Focusing on your customers will bring you closer to achieving your business goals. Therefore, a product owner and a development team should identify and record all functional and non-functional user demands. This would help to prioritize product features and exclude unnecessary ones.

A use case diagram is instrumental at this stage, as it models the solution’s functionality by displaying actors and use cases. The diagram visualizes the functional demands of a system that will further translate into design decisions and development priorities.

The following example demonstrates the use case diagram for a web console with the three actors involved. It can also serve as a template for technical documentation.

User requirement documents and use case diagrams address the following project needs:

• Establish achievable goals and link product development ideas with business value.
• Form a basis for communication between stakeholders and the software engineering team.
• Explain the priorities for particular features and business models.
• Set accountability for attaining specific results.
• Cut down costs and drive future profits.

Create Interactive Wireframes

Clickable wireframes illustrate the future product’s user interface. This software documentation tool is indispensable for developing project documentation, as it gives the following opportunities: evaluating the potential system UX, revealing missing requirements, and keeping all parties updated.

Interactive wireframes are also an inexpensive way to verify a product’s performance that is very similar to a final version. By demonstrating wireframes to the client, you can implement comments and fine tune the screens. Further, wireframes lay the foundation for adequate UX documentation.

Outline Functional Demands

The functional specification describes operations and activities that a system must be able to conduct. It includes all functionalities of the solution: from the input to the system to its behavior, data manipulation, user interaction, and output.

Outline Non-functional Requirements

This section relates to quality attributes and represents the general system properties. The documents may contain the aspects of security, capacity, compatibility, performance, reliability, usability, scalability, and other requirements. Adequately created documentation highlights the quality attribute of the solution, guarantees excellent UX, and reduces expenses.

Construct a Technical Architecture Diagram

The diagram overviews the available systems and represents how the system parts interact with each other. It displays the interdependence of all elements and helps to ensure compliance with system-relevant requirements.

An architecture diagram contains three main components:

• Standardized process flow of data
• Information in elements with logical categories
• Annotations with complementary information to enhance the implementation of solutions

Here’s an example of a technical architecture diagram for a healthcare enterprise:

Tips for Creating Profound Software Documentation

Once we’ve explored the processes and types of software documentation, it’s time to share several tips for composing quality documentation.

Incorporate a Readme file Before Coding Details

The purpose of Readme files is to describe the solution to its users and programmers. The files explain the product use and contain a general project overview. Apart from this information, Readme files may include:

• Instructions for installation and operation
• The list of included files
• The information about licensing
• Potential bugs
• Credits

Set up an Issue Tracker to Gather Feedback

Record the issues reported by your colleagues or product users with the help of issue trackers. First, this will help you manage the steps taken to resolve issues and keep the team informed of the progress. Second, an issue tracker will come in handy if the problem repeats in the future. In this case, your team can consult the tracker to review which procedures helped to correct the problem.

Besides, adding coding conventions to technical documentation is a good idea. The functionality of your solution and the whole way it performs depends on coding. Therefore, it makes sense to inform your colleagues which programming method and style you select to retain consistency and let them better understand the software they are dealing with.

Record Each Version of Your Files–Including the Edits You Made

You can follow the best practice and list every version of the created files and edits in your software development documentation. Implement a unified system of tracking versions so that each team member understands how many versions exist and which of them have been updated recently.

Use Technical Documentation Templates and Tools

Tech documentation is diverse and multifaceted. Its creation may require significant time and resources. That’s why software development teams can utilize examples and templates of documentation for software development. For each type of doc, you can find multiple options of a template for technical documentation, which are either free and ready for implementation or can be tailored for your specific purposes.

Tech documentation template types are numerous and include the following:

1. General software documentation templates offer a variety of samples for the software development process and project management.
2. Quality assurance template for software documentation includes testing checklists, plans, guidelines, and more.
3. Software design templates help create product or technical specifications.

To ease the life of your software engineering team further, you can take advantage of countless tools for software documentation. Just like with tech documentation templates, there are specific tools for various categories of documents. 

General purpose tools for technical documentation aid in formulating product requirements, sharing product information, and documenting features and processes, Roadmap tools enable quick information exchange, easy updates to schedules and structure, and other editing opportunities.

Tools for technical documentation concerning UX basically include prototyping tools that assist in constructing sketches, interactive prototypes, and more. Software documentation tools for technical writers are regarded as content management systems and allow writers to compose, organize, and manage various documentation easily.

These lists of documentation tools and templates for developers are far from exhaustive. If you struggle to compose the proper tech documents and streamline the project life cycle, you can turn to a software development provider.

Introduce Visuals and Examples in Documentation

Often the most clear and accessible explanation of how to use a product is the use of visuals and real examples. To do this, ask your development team to participate in writing real-life use cases, as well as creating instructions for graphics specialists who can translate them into a clear and easy-to-perceive form.

Make It a Collaborative Effort 

When documentation is created by the developers themselves, it can be poorly structured, disorganized, and full of specific terms and concepts that end users don’t need to know. This approach generally complicates the perception and understanding of the released software solution, significantly increasing its learning curve.

To avoid this situation, you have to involve technical copywriters and other non-technical specialists in writing documentation. They’ll be able to transform the complex thoughts of developers into readable text, examples, and pictures.

Keep Your Software Documentation Up-to-date

We’ve outlined the importance of keeping documentation up to date, so let us remind you once again: the task of updating it in accordance with updates to the project itself should be one of the highest priorities. Otherwise, you risk releasing a product that only a few can fully use.

Use Software Documentation Metrics and KPIs to Check Its Efficiency

Both during the writing process and after software documentation is ready, you can use several key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that will help you get an objective assessment of the quality, efficiency, and resources spent on it. Let’s look at these metrics and KPIs in more detail below.

• Completeness. Determine the percentage of the product’s features and capabilities described in the documentation in relation to the total number of its features and capabilities. If you find that many aspects have been left unaddressed, this will determine your next path to correcting the gaps.
• Coverage. Estimate what percentage of the software code of your digital solution is covered by the documentation. This will give you some assurance that your documentation covers the entire project evenly.
• Accuracy. Provide documentation to your developers for review to evaluate the accuracy of the wording used in it. You will also need to identify a list of all possible inaccuracies and plan to correct them gradually.
• Consistency. Determine how consistent the terminology, style, and layout are across all sections of your documentation. If inconsistencies are found, it will likely lead to confusion among actual users.
• Ease of use. Try to determine the ease of navigation of the documentation by having it assessed by non-technical specialists or focus group representatives. The most effective evaluation methods include surveys, questionnaires, usability testing, etc. The key metrics you will need to determine are the number of search queries, click-through rates in search results, and successful searches.
• Quality of interaction. Conduct a series of activities dedicated to tracking the quality of user interaction with documentation to calculate key parameters such as page views, time spent on the page, and bounce rate. Overall, this will give you insight into whether users find your documentation valuable and relevant.
• Real user feedback. Collect user feedback through surveys, feedback forms, comments, ratings, etc. to identify key areas for improvement.
• Service time. Calculate the time and effort required to write, update, and maintain the documentation. Here, you need to achieve the optimal balance between the resources spent and the quality of the final version of the documentation.
• End time. Estimate the time you spend updating documentation as new features appear in your project. The smaller this parameter is, the faster you can respond to subsequent changes and updates.
• Contribution. Monitor the level of involvement in writing documentation by individual specialists: developers, technical copywriters, community members, real users, etc. This will show you how productive the collaboration is between different parties of the project.
• Availability. Finally, you’ll need to evaluate the accessibility of the documentation for users with disabilities. This can be done, for example, by checking WCAG 2.0 guidelines.

Thanks to regular assessment of all these metrics, you will be able to promptly identify bottlenecks in your documentation and eliminate them before they cause significant damage to the overall image of your product.

The Need for Documentation in Software Development: Final Thoughts

Comprehensive software documentation elevates the efficiency of the product development process and helps engineering teams build a stellar solution. To create excellent software development documents, make them clear and concise, follow industry standards, and use the respective templates and documentation tools for developers. To attain sensational results, consult with a reliable software development provider like NIX and leverage professional expertise.