Great article highlighting the benefits of documentation.
I wholeheartedly agree that documentation is extremely helpful, especially if the product grows to a point where it has more than one or two developers working on it.
However I also agree with Nicholas’ comment. Having worked in a lean startup environment, if you are to stand any chance of success you need to move quickly. There’s no point in having detailed documentation for your code if that code never gets launched.
I have found that a compromise between the two works well. At Sonix Media we use agile-development techniques to a certain extent, but ensure that we spend time documenting the important areas. That way we get 80% of the benefit for 20% of the work.
I’ve found that a decent IDE such as PHPed is a great timesaver as its inbuilt commenting features and project support make really easy to add documentation whilst developing.
Andy Webber
Great article highlighting the benefits of documentation.
I wholeheartedly agree that documentation is extremely helpful, especially if the product grows to a point where it has more than one or two developers working on it.
However I also agree with Nicholas’ comment. Having worked in a lean startup environment, if you are to stand any chance of success you need to move quickly. There’s no point in having detailed documentation for your code if that code never gets launched.
I have found that a compromise between the two works well. At Sonix Media we use agile-development techniques to a certain extent, but ensure that we spend time documenting the important areas. That way we get 80% of the benefit for 20% of the work.
I’ve found that a decent IDE such as PHPed is a great timesaver as its inbuilt commenting features and project support make really easy to add documentation whilst developing.