Documentation guide – is a material that gathers all the methods and collective practices which allow creation of software documentation.
The main feature of these guides is a ‘how-to-guide’ piece which is necessary for creating step-by-step instructions.
Any business team that works in the sphere of product development has to struggle with a great number of various documents. These documents obey the specific rules of creation, and the guide of building it is necessary. Now, let’s have a close look at this part of product development and its importance for the entire business.
What is the Purpose of a Documentation Guide?
First of all, the documentation guide obtains great importance for development and software documentation as it provides detailed information on how to document properly. As software documentation performs as a description of all the necessary techniques, people, tools, time, and other necessary parts of the development of a digital product, it must have a logical and meaningful structure along with substantial points described. A documentation guide is widely used to understand and practical techniques for building such a plan.
Documentation can be created by developers, quality assurance engineers, business analysts, or product managers. That demonstrates the versatile nature of documentation guides as any business team member may use them. Moreover, any additions or changes in the product during the development process shall be documented, so this guide is a useful tool for anyone.
Examples of Documentation Software
Guides provide methods and collective processes and give special software for writing and managing the product documentation. There are several best representatives of documentation software.
- Process Street (allows not only to document all the necessary data in one place but also train new developers. Uses different kinds of widgets: image, text, video, file, email, etc.);
- Dropbox Paper (used only for internal software documentation; it can create a private wiki for product’s team; allows to link documents together, insert full code blocks and images);
- iA Writer (helps to write new documentation by using a library feature that allows making references to other documentation. Also provides user’s navigation by the usage of page jump anchors);
- ProProfs Knowledge Base (provides tools for writing, editing, customizing, and publishing; allows users to add all kinds of non-textual content and import files of any kind: Word docs, PDF, PPTs).