Building the documentation

An easier way to guide your readers and your writers is to provide each one of them with helpers and guidelines, as we have learned in the previous section of this chapter.

From a writer's point of view, this is done by having a set of reusable templates together with a guide that describes how and when to use them in a project. It is called a documentation portfolio.

From a reader's point of view, it is important to be able to browse the documentation with no pain, and getting used to finding the information efficiently. It is done by building a document landscape.

Building the portfolio

There are many kinds of documents a software project can have, from low-level documents that refer directly to the code, to design papers that provide a high-level overview of the application.

For instance, Scott Ambler defines an extensive list of document types in his book, Agile Modeling: Effective Practices for eXtreme Programming and the Unified Process, John Wiley & Sons...