Feedback, testing, and maintenance

The previous section covered internal feedback before publishing content. This section covers feedback and usage from your intended users and how to manage that. Getting and processing feedback and metrics on documentation is notoriously difficult. I cover some things I have tried and worked with and things that I know others have tried. However, none of these options are perfect, and the documentarian community is still looking for the “best” way to handle this. There are a handful of ways you are likely to receive feedback on documentation:

• If your documentation is open source, readers and users may create issues about problems they find on the repository for the source of the documentation.
• If the code for the application is open source, users may create issues about problems they have understanding the documentation for the project in the source repository.
• If you add some form of feedback widget (a comments box,...