Documentation

⚠ You need documentation!

While it takes time to write usable documentation and takes a lot of effort to keep documentation updated, I think there is no way around documentation.

There are tons of tools, frameworks, apps etc. to make it easy to write and publish documentation in the first place, but usually it is a onetime job. After the documentation is created it is forgotten.

Ideas to mitigate these problems during software development:

Only document the non-obvious
Treat documentation as code
- Use any VCS
- Write tests
Choose a format that is easy to learn and use
Keep the documentation close to the sources
- Generate code documentation from source code
- Keep additional documentation in the same repository