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Software Engineering Documentation Best Practice? (self.programming)

submitted 1 month ago by Schal330 to c/[email protected]

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Hey all, I'm still a junior dev with years of experience in IT. One of the things I've noticed since making the switch is that (at least where I work) documentation is inconsistent.

Things I encounter include incomplete documentation, outdated documentation and written process details that have assumed knowledge which makes it difficult for junior Devs to pick up.

I've had a search and a lot of what is out there talks more about product and how to document that SDLC rather than best practice in writing and organising documents against the actual software engineering and its processes.

Does anyone have any good sources or suggestions on how I could look to try and begin to improve documentation within my team?

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[–] Windex007 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Writings self documenting code is so important.

Comments get stale and over time transition from: accurate to outdated, to eventually flat-out lies.

Go hard in the paint when choosing method or variable names. If it's hard to give them coherent names, that's a code smell.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Comments get stale and over time transition from: accurate to outdated, to eventually flat-out lies.

Sounds like some people aren’t doing their work enough then. Code comments are part of the work that a programmer should do, not an afterthought. Who else is gonna update that code if not the programmer? And if a programmer isn’t supposed to update their code and we can just all write clean code that would somehow make us all be better engineers (yeah, I use this title differently from programmers), then why are code comments even a thing?

Self-documenting code is good and all, but so should there be good comments.

[–] Windex007 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I agree that would be ideal.

I flat out do not trust each of the 500 devs operating on our codebase to maintain comments.

Tests are documentation, code can be documentation. Those run through CI.

If you can keep comments updated at scale, do it. If you can't don't pray for a miracle and find something that you actually can enforce

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

That’s why reviewers should also watch out for comments to ensure their quality. Hence why I said it’s part of a programmer’s job, not some afterthought.