Use docs as code to supercharge your dev team

Dev teams are always under pressure to deliver new features, so asking them to spend time documenting can feel like pulling teeth (all of them).

However, if you don't create and reinforce a culture of writing, documentation can quickly become unclear, outdated, and scattered — an all too common occurrence in software development.  

Inadequate documentation puts your team at risk for:

• Decreased developer productivity: Devs and stakeholders may struggle to follow each other's work. They can spend hours searching for answers and even duplicate efforts.

• Bugs: Unclear documentation can cause misunderstandings about the software's architecture, functionality, and usage. As a result, developers may implement features incorrectly.

• Knowledge Loss: Lack of comprehensive, accessible documentation confines critical knowledge to a few individuals. If those team members leave, the resulting knowledge loss can slow down development.

These internal challenges don't just frustrate developers. They are also detrimental to customer experience, delaying product delivery and diminishing the quality, reliability, and usability of your product. 

We know documentation is important and developers have limited bandwidth. So how can we make it easier for developers to write and maintain useful documentation?

"Docs as Code" is a developer-friendly way of aligning documentation with constantly changing code. It uses the same tools and processes that teams use for code, applying software development principles to create, update, manage, and distribute documentation.

Ways docs as code can accelerate dev teams

4 ways the Docs as Code methodology can supercharge developer teams:

1. Integration with development tools

2. Facilitating collaboration

3. Maintaining version control

4. Leveraging markdown and lightweight formats

Integration with development tools

In traditional development workflows, documentation can lag behind code changes, leading to misunderstandings, wasted time, and even incorrect implementations.

Docs as Code keeps code and documentation in sync by using the same version control system for both, ensuring that they always reflect each other accurately. When a developer modifies a function, they can immediately update the corresponding documentation, so the two never diverge.

This integration eliminates the disconnect that can often occur between what's documented and the actual state of the code. Having docs within the same repository makes it easier to track changes and reduce inconsistencies.

Facilitating collaboration

When code and documentation are managed with different tools, writers and developers often struggle to collaborate. This siloed approach makes it difficult to discuss changes, requirements, and expectations, leading to misunderstandings and conflicts.

Maintaining version control 

Docs as Code allows teams to use branching, merging, and other VCS features to align with every stage and iteration of the software. This reduces the risk of errors, miscommunications, and time spent hunting down the right version of a document.

Here's what streamlined version control can look like in practice:

Your team is developing version 3.0 of a product while also providing support and patches for versions 1.5 and 2.0. 

With a Docs as Code approach, the documentation is stored alongside the code in the same version control repository. This means that when a developer fixes a bug in version 2.0, they can simply check out the 2.0 branch of the codebase and find the corresponding documentation right there. They can then update both the code and the documentation within the same branch, ensuring that the changes are aligned and that the documentation accurately reflects the state of the code for that version.

Leveraging markdown and lightweight formats

Developers, testers, product managers, and technical writers often have varying levels of technical expertise. As a result, using a heavy and proprietary documentation format can make it difficult for some team members to interpret, create, and edit documentation.

Docs as Code leverages Markdown, a plain text formatting syntax that can be easily written and read in any text editor. This enables the whole team to actively contribute to documentation. Developers can jot down technical notes right in their code editor, testers can add observations without needing to switch to a specialized tool, and writers can focus on content without getting bogged down in complex formatting requirements.

Markdown files can also be version-controlled along with the code, allowing for easy tracking of changes, branching, and merging. The output can be automatically generated into various formats like HTML, PDF, or Word, ensuring a consistent look across different platforms and devices.

Getting Started

Docs as Code applies the discipline, collaboration, and automation of software development to the documentation process. Documentation undergoes the same quality control measures as the code itself, aligning the entire team in pursuit of shared excellence.

Although Docs as Code can lead to more efficient workflows and higher-quality products, it's not a one-size-fits-all solution. The decision to adopt Docs as Code should be based on an analysis of project requirements, the team's workflow, and overall goals for both the code and the accompanying documentation.

Some questions to consider:

• Do we have frequent updates to code and documentation that would benefit from a unified approach?

• Are there communication challenges between developers, technical writers, and other stakeholders?

• Are our current tools and workflows compatible with Docs as Code?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, Docs as Code may be an effective solution for your development needs.