For those who can do it well, I salute you and urge your
employer to give you a massive raise.
The problem for most of us is that we don??™t have an organized way to approaching documentation.
Usually, we do it after we??™ve already completed the activity, and much of the detail comes from
memory. I know I??™ve documented things that way, and I usually return to it five years later thinking to
myself, ???Whoever put this together clearly didn??™t know what they were . . . oh wait, I wrote this!???
It takes a great deal of discipline, but anyone can create useful documentation. The key is to break
it down and follow a few simple rules:
??? Start simple: There??™s no reason you need to document absolutely everything at once. An author
doesn??™t try to write a novel in a single pass. When doing the documentation, people often hit a
common problem for authors: writer??™s block. Instead, start with a high-level outline and build from
there. Each level of the outline should have some reference to other documentation that is
already available. For example, you could have a heading that says, ???Restore from backup, but do
not recover the database; refer to Books Online.
Pages:
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214