SEWM#2 Documentation - Why its Important ?

Documentation There are many type of Documentation exist in this universe but I am going to concern about the field which i belongs to Software , Being a Humble Programmer i gonna tell something about source code documentation why its important.

Let me start from the definition wiki says ,

Software documentation or source code documentation is written text that accompanies computer software. It either explains how it operates or how to use it, and may mean different things to people in different roles

Few weeks back i had to browse about a this software , i don't found any thing about the source
code documentation aka API docs from their damn website so i tried to download the source and check with the documentation or try to build on my own using javadoc

To my surprise theres is no single piece of information about the legacy way of saying This method will do this when called with this object.. Shit i hate that.. There is no comments too added in the source I have to figure out logically what it does a by white boxing the code ... Zzzzzzzzzzzzz...

Well this is good thats the reason why i had to write this blog :)

Personally i am bored to do documentation Not alone me most of the developers hate it !
Check for most open source projects whats the thing you find lagging the most ?
Yeah its Documentation

When ever i was asked to do documentation I got Bored and even I had thought it was not part of my job :) How that can be ? Come on Don't curse me learning from errors will make you experienced ..And now i am experienced . I don't hate documentation completely i do add nice comments to the code i developed . is that enough? No definitely not ,


Here what Eric says about Documentation ,

Rule 1 of writing software for nontechnical users is this: if they have to read documentation to use it you designed it wrong.

And here from Steve McConnell in his book code complete2 ,

Good code is its own best documentation. As you're about to add a comment, ask yourself, 'How can I improve the code so that this comment isn't needed?' Improve the code and then document it to make it even clearer.

I couldn't say any more.. Its perfectly well said. So whats the programmers profession , apart form Code programmer should document .

When creating software, code alone is insufficient. There must be some text along with it to describe various aspects of its intended operation. It is important for the code documents to be thorough, but not so verbose that it becomes difficult to maintain them

So when ever you get a chance to code, first document it . I finish with this ,

Don't document the program; program the document