Documentation? Again?

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:

• 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.

Documentation?

Well, yes. Documentation. You know that you have to write it for your code, but you never write it, because it's soo boring. And when you have to deal with other's code, you blame them for not writing the documentation.

OK, all clear, next post please.

Well, if you are still here, that's what I wanted to say. There are many huge projects done by serious companies with lots of the documentation. And it's clear that they spent lots of time on documenting all and every public function. But still they are doing it in a wrong way! Lots of documentation is not great by itself!