When developers write documentation - It usually turns out to be little more than digital chicken scratch.
Would you hire a meat butcher to perform surgery? Or would you ask a court reporter to represent you in a criminal trail? No, then why do you have developers write documentation? Developers are no more equipped to write documentation than a monkey working on Newtonians Thorium.
If your going to invest a lot of time, money and effort into developing software, develop an equal amount of time, money and effort into hiring a professional writer for the documentation. The results from your customer base will be well worth the effort.
This was very common in the mid to late bloom of the dot.com era. Some companies, having little or no experiance with documentation of any sort, relied on programmers, entry-level marketeers, interns and over the hill journalists to contruct readable technical documentation.
Many organizations have no clue the difference between a User Guide a User Manual a Read Me First and a Release Notes documents are - and what is the intended audience for each. Not to mention what the tranlation hassles, if your providing a product world-wide.
Show me a developer who can write quality documentation and I will show you poorly developed code.
Technical writing is not something for washed out journalists, marketeers or developers.
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When developers write documentation - It usually turns out to be little more than digital chicken scratch. Would you hire a meat butcher to perform surgery? Or would you ask a court reporter to represent you in a criminal trail? No, then why do you have developers write documentation? Developers are no more equipped to write documentation than a monkey working on Newtonians Thorium. If your going to invest a lot of time, money and effort into developing software, develop an equal amount of time, money and effort into hiring a professional writer for the documentation. The results from your customer base will be well worth the effort.
This was very common in the mid to late bloom of the dot.com era. Some companies, having little or no experiance with documentation of any sort, relied on programmers, entry-level marketeers, interns and over the hill journalists to contruct readable technical documentation. Many organizations have no clue the difference between a User Guide a User Manual a Read Me First and a Release Notes documents are - and what is the intended audience for each. Not to mention what the tranlation hassles, if your providing a product world-wide.
Show me a developer who can write quality documentation and I will show you poorly developed code. Technical writing is not something for washed out journalists, marketeers or developers.