Need some advice, small startup, not Microsoft. How do I get engineering teams to write better public facing documentation? (For example, provide more examples, screenshots, alternatives, links to other relevant pages, updating when new APIs etc). Do you guys hire a part time documentation person, assign x% sprint time to this? Have you seen something has worked in a small company of under 300 devs?
We do an entire sprint of just that when need to. Working pretty well
Thanks, definitely one of top options in my mind.
Even just a "doc day" which is focused on docs could be effective. Add special catered lunch and some form of success measure for extra motivation.
Instrument page views, maybe even time spent per page. Then link this to a dashboard to encourage engineers. ?
Add it to “Definition of Done”
Tie it to perf.
Assuming the team is generally motivated and high performing, you're probably not giving them enough context about what "good documentation" means. It generally takes years to understand what good coding is, why would expect them to automatically know what good documentation is and how to do it well?
That's true. Created a few benchmark 'great documentation's for some of the APIs but getting them to adopt is hard.
Convince them that it is not a wasted effort on their part. Most documents are never read or used after they are written. They usually drift from reality once written. We hate waste. We hate busywork. Make it worth our while.
How do I do this? Is it a speech? Is it a gift card? What will convince?
When was the last time that documentation was actually used?