Why documentation matters

Welcome to the last chapter of this book. You have come a long way, and before you put this book down, for the time being, we want to draw your attention to the often-neglected topic of creating documentation. Let us convince you on the following pages that documentation does not necessarily have to be tiring and annoying, but instead has valuable benefits.

Why documentation is important

Why should we actually create any documentation? Is our code, or our tests, not enough documentation already? There is some truth in these thoughts, and we will discuss this topic further in this section. Yet over the years, countless developers have never stopped creating countless documents, so there must be something about it.

We create documentation because we can make it easier for other people to work with our software. It is about context, which cannot be easily extracted from reading the code of a couple of classes. Documentation is often not only about the...