Documenting Your Product – Why?

In our last post in this series on Documenting Your Product, we talked about Use Cases. At the end of the last post, I said we’d talk about writing technical requirements in the next post in the series. However, I got a really great response from Christopher McGuire at iScribes to the last article about more of the “why” behind documentation that goes well beyond the reasons in the first article. I wanted to share / add to what he had to say mid-stream in the series.

Christopher wrote:

“Documentation is also CRUCIAL for industry audits (financial, insurance, HIPAA for healthcare, etc), crucial in due diligence for investment or M&A talks, and crucial for employee training.

Many of our large customers want to see security/ architecture/ design documentation as part of the buying process as well. “

Christopher made a couple of really great points here. If you’re in a regulated industry such as the ones mentioned above, documentation of not only the technology but also your processes and procedures for updating and making changes to the system are absolutely required.

If you implement the practices of basic documentation from the beginning that we’re going through in this series, it will save you scramble time in the run up to audits, investor meetings, and all the other things Christopher mentioned.

Thanks to Christopher for writing back and providing these additional insights.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.