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If you are developing your own architecture or heavily use anothers vendors API, how do you promote awareness to the programming staff? For example, say you use Infragistics controls for you C# winforms apps - the controls have boatloads of methods, some quirks, and a best way to use them for your application. How do you promote the knowledge transfer thru your programming staff? Wiki's? Email? Blogs?.

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2 Answers

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Documentation seems like the most reasonable place to inform your development team regarding implementation and usage of external libraries/API.s

Emails get lost, are not read. Wikis are for interlinked content.
Blogs are usually for individuals.

Documentation is for communicating evidence of something.

Although I suppose you could have a meeting initially when a project starts to discuss a chosen API/library to make sure 1. everyone is on the same page and 2. no one has a concern with using it that may have been missed.

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How to you keep the documentation up-to-date? Do you enforce a process in which the developers must update the Word document after implemented a fix/feature enhancement? – bigtang Oct 14 '10 at 14:21
+1. @bigtang, to make up-date painless, your documenting system has to be automated. Like XML documentation member in C# and tools like SandCastle – user2567 Oct 14 '10 at 14:52
Not familar with SandCastle, but I suspect this is very technical documentation - while this is useful I'd also like to capture best-practice stuff as well ie When using Infragistic grid in a <specific>blotter use the async calling methods because blah blah blah – bigtang Oct 14 '10 at 15:32
Word documents are not for software documentation. Also, guidelines need to be in place for a development team to work together. Specifications for a project will define the project itself and these can be as specific as we will use X API for this project and as general as this software will solve such and such problem. – Chris Oct 14 '10 at 16:50
Word docs are definitely not for project doc. I advocate the use of ASCIIDoc, which is plain old text so easy for a dev to use, yet is generated into pretty looking docs. The 'auto generated' doc from source code via Sandcastle or Doxygen has its place, but it is not a substitute for real documentation. Its just an easy way to "browse" the source code. – gbjbaanb Apr 19 '12 at 13:30
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up vote 0 down vote

Use a combination of formats, appropriate for each knowledge function.

  • Blogs and RSS feeds can be used to announce updates, news items, etc.

  • Wikis can be used to document current standards, policies, processes, how-tos, APIs, etc. The content can be structured, given a table of contents and index, support the development of commentaries, provide versioning, dynamic updates, etc.

  • Forums/discussion boards can be used to work out issues of a technical or managerial nature.

Definitely allow tagging of content tagged for a variety of categories (data types, layer, functionality, bugs, etc).

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