Software Documentation

Software Documentation - Scripting the Future of Software

The last decades of the twentieth century witnessed drastic cost reductions in computer hardware, leading software to become a ubiquitous component of the electronic devices. The need for versatile, customized, and innovative software increased rapidly and with that increased the volume of software development work going on in the corporate world.

But soon it was well understood that developing software was not as easy as it seemed in the first instant. Missing deadlines, exceeding budgets, and changing requirements all demanded a systematic approach to software development, which in turn gave birth to the whole new concept of software engineering. And with acceptance of software engineering as the new engineering discipline, christening of the term software documentation was not far away.

But ever since its recognition as a separate process, software documentation played the role of a second fiddle to software development, accompanying the SDLC process as an extra burden.

The treatment meted out to software documentation was analogous to that of nature itself. We all talked about it, but nobody did anything significant to bring into limelight, the importance of software documentation.

But the recent past has seen an unprecedented growth and dependence on the existence of this much neglected stepbrother of software development. And it has almost been like the metamorphosis of a side-hero to a superhero. Thanks to all the confusion generated during the SDLC processes that has led to the emergence of the hitherto unexplored world of software documentation.

Software engineering cleanly dissects the entire SDLC process into the four phases of analysis, design, coding, and testing. Not only that, software engineering specifies that each of these four phases must end with the production of documents, which will be deemed as the output of the respective phases and will be used as the input to the next phase.

It was not just a formality because of which the software engineers considered documenting the proceedings of each phase rather it was a well thought of decision, which formed the basis upon which software engineering boasted of delivering defect free software on time. But the fact of the matter is, developers never believed that putting some extra effort in completing the documentation correctly during the SDLC process could actually relieve them from loads of rework.

As long as the same developers were working throughout the entire SDLC processes, their viewpoint on neglecting the documentation process could never be questioned. But the recent past has rejuvenated the software industry with a lot of changes.

Launching innovative software products and yet reducing the time-to-market has become the mantra for success in the software arena. Add to it, the cutthroat competition in the software market that doesn’t tolerate a single bug in the leading product. Besides, consumers are also not going to accept anything deviating from their exact requirements.

All these factors demand excellency in any task being performed in conjunction with the SDLC process thereby compelling us to indulge specialists, such as analysts and designers in the development process. And managing these diverse specialists effectively demands a single thread of connection – software documentation.

From tracking phase proceedings, to validating customer requirements, to bridging gap among the specialists, everything calls for just one term, software documentation. It’s a pity that we had kept ourselves blindfolded to this magnificent solution to all the problems of software development. The software development industry can now breathe a sigh of relief saying “In the midst of winter (software related problems), I finally found, there was in me an invincible summer – software documentation”

posted by navneet biet @ 11:12 PM