A year and a half ago I was already whining on the quality of documentation even of big companies. Since then the situation seems to get even worse!
I recently came upon this article - "Api Documentation" by Chris Parnin. The article is a research studying the fact that most developers are using StackOverflow as a main documentation source. I totally recommend to read the whole article, but here I'll just quote the main result of the study:
I recently came upon this article - "Api Documentation" by Chris Parnin. The article is a research studying the fact that most developers are using StackOverflow as a main documentation source. I totally recommend to read the whole article, but here I'll just quote the main result of the study:
- Developers may be getting as much as 50% of their documentation from Stack Overflow.
- More examples can be found on Stack Overflow than the official documentation guide.
- In web searches, Stack Overflow questions are visited 2x-10x more often than official documentation.
