Project Documentation Guidelines Checklist
Why this project?
Sometime around Dec 2019, I had a conversation with my manager in which we had realised that when we are involving freelancers to work on some of our company projects and when those projects need to be transistioned to be maintained, enhanced and further developed by employees of the company who may or may not have been involved in the project in the initial phases of it having built or even if they haven't been involved during code reviews, the knowledge transfer sessions(if any) etc., as part of the project handover, in such cases how could they still manage to get up and running with the project in almost no time even without them having this initial context related to the project and certain level of required domain knowledge to get started . This was what lead to the documentation guidelines checklist in the hopes that we could come up with something generic that could be shared or used as a reference even for new projects going forward that freelancers would work upon or even full time employees within the company would build from scratch.
This checklist is currently still being tweaked for further improvement from within the company to serve the required purpose for which it was initially built but in the mean time I'm really grateful to my manager and my company for allowing me the opportunity to share the work done so far on this and I'm also specifically grateful to Beth Aitman and Daniel D Beck who were kind enough to allow me to use their related work on this as a reference while coming up with these guidelines.
The Project Documentation Guidelines checklist
The contents of the Project Documentation Guidelines checklist can be accessed here
Gratitude
A good amount of work present above is taken from the initial work done by Beth Aitman here and Daniel D. Beck here. I'm specifically grateful to Beth Aitman who was so approachable and took the time to respond to a complete stranger(me) promptly on this around the last week of Dec 2019 and also share links to Daniel's and her work via twitter. I'm also thankful to my manager for allowing me to open source this work that I had done as part of my company hours.
Contributing
Personally I believe there's always room for improvement in oneself and with that in mind I believe the same for these guidelines. This is the first time I'll be ever trying to maintain any open source project and I'm happy to receive feedback through Github issues and Pull requests(PR's - please fork the branch and submit a PR based on how to submit a PR related guidelines mentioned here if you would like to contribute ideas on how to improve this project further), I would like to kindly just let you know one thing in advance, that my main goal with regard to open sourcing this project was to publicly share the initial work I had the opportunity to do as part of this so that if one may find this useful, they can feel free to use it and modify it as per their requirement. I'm grateful to the people whose work I could use as a reference to build this project and in the spirit of giving back to open source, wanted to do the very little I could to pay it forward. With this is mind, whenever I may have the time to look into the newly opened Github issues or PRs with regard to this project, I'll be happy to engage with those users and work with them towards taking in their suggested improvements with regard to this project, however I'd request you to kindly understand if I'm unable to respond promptly/regularly to your open issues and PRs because there are other things that I may be involved with at a given point in time. Thank you for your understanding and co-operation on this :)
Additional Food for Thought - Closing thoughts :)
"You can make a big difference to documentation visibility by applying some readability techniques, in short 'write readably'" - Beth Aitman at LeadDevBerlin 2019
Found the project documentation guidelines checklist useful?
Since a good amount of work in this project is thanks to the work done by Beth Aitman and Daniel D Beck, definitely consider letting them know first. Additionally, if you'd like to, you can also take a moment to let mohnish know that you used this checklist. You can let him know via a tweet or email him at: mail4mohnishj@gmail.com if you'd prefer to reach out personally.