Ask HN: How do your team write documentation? Hello, I have got questions regarding documentation writing within a team of software engineers. Some context: I am a new project leader in the computing department of a medium-sized company. My team is 6 software engineers. We are building a new product, and I cannot get the team to write documentation - we need both an user guide and API documentation too. It is seriously lagging behind, for 3 main reasons I guess: * the product is a moving target, API is not 100% stable, no one wants to start something and have to redo it later * everybody in the team prefers to write new features and code than documentation * the release date seems "far away" (in 18 months) We follow a kind of scrum methodology, but it is not enough to have documentation stories to get nice documentation ;) So here are my questions: * how do you deal with developers writing documentation ? * are there some techniques that help ? * which tools do you use ? I am thinking of gitbook for user guide, and Sphynx for API documentation * is it a good idea to hire a "technical writer" to have a specialist writing documentation instead of software engineers ? * how does it work for open-source projects ? Documentation is sometimes really great, I would like to know the recipe :) Any help would be appreciated ! Thanks in advance. |