Documentation

Need for documentation

We’ve discussed strategies for how to enforce consistent coding standards and typespecs. These are arguably objective metrics. Documentation, on the other hand, is essential to maintaining a consistent codebase, but since it’s for human readers, it’s much more subjective.

For experienced developers, documentation of public and common interfaces allows rapid ramp-up and removes friction. For new adopters, documentation is essential. Documentation will help them internalize how the new application works and serves as the first point of communication between the code producer and consumer. In this lesson, we’ll look at ways to help automate aspects of our documentation. We’ll look at tools to help build tested examples into our code and check the health of our documentation with a single automated metric.