Software engineering practices

Contains:

Documentation in the same repo as the code

The most important characteristic of internal documentation is trust: do people trust that documentation both exists and is up-to-date?

If they don’t, they won’t read it or contribute to it.

The best trick I know of for improving the trustworthiness of documentation is to put it in the same repository as the code it documents, for a few reasons:

  1. You can enforce documentation updates as part of your code review process. If a PR changes code in a way that requires documentation updates, the reviewer can ask for those updates to be included.
  2. You get versioned documentation. If you’re using an older version of a library you can consult the documentation for that version. If you’re using the current main branch you can see documentation for that, without confusion over what corresponds to the most recent “stable” release.
  3. You can integrate your documentation with your automated tests! I wrote about this in Documentation unit tests, which describes a pattern for introspecting code and then ensuring that the documentation at least has a section header that matches specific concepts, such as plugin hooks or configuration options.

Similar to thoughts I’ve published in the handbook:

https://handbook.tmpdir.org/documentation.html#tips-for-successful-documentation