People often forget to keep a proper documentation of the works that are performed in a project development or may be in a simple bug fix.
Now-a-days we are more focused in tracking our task/work whereas we ignore that a good self documentation can act as a good mentor, which will reduce repetitive efforts.
Even if you are working as an individual, team or may be an open-source contributor.
"A good document is your best friend."
Why documenting work is important ?
Reduce duplicate task : May be while fixing a bug or some sort of development we observe some error, that is faced previously by the person or the team-mates. So if proper documentation is their that how the issue can be handled or what is the effective work around, then it would reduce the duplicate work of the next person facing the same issue.
Self Revision : We understand that sometimes we are working on multiple projects parallelly. And it is really hard to recall the approach that we did may be in our previous project or may be confused about the work arounds done in some other defect. But, we can make it easy to find and revise with the documents that we created.
Knowledge Transfer : We all know that KT plays a important role for growing as team or individual. But sometimes it becomes hard to get the proper bandwidth of an expert, from whom we can gather the KT. Here, the documentation plays a major role. Creating a brief and significant documentation helps to gain a quick and required knowledge.
Onboarding new folks : If you are working as a team or a open-source repository maintainer, then you already know the struggle of making the new folks familiar with the ongoing project. A good documentation can make your stress lower.
"David, I am facing a problem with the implementation of the new enhancements, What to do?????
David: "No issues buddy, We have already maintained the commonly faced issues document in our team, you can easily refer that and get the solution."
How to keep records / documentation ?
The generic way of keeping a documentation is maintaining a document (word, excel or any editor you like) which include each and every steps, changes or enhancements involved in your project.
But this is not the only way, if you think your documents can be more understandable if you explain some concepts/steps over a video then please include your self created video in the documentation. If also may involve various resource link or other sources that might be required as a support. It will be easy for you also to recap.
A good tip can be keeping your documentation in a commonly accessed location (may be a cloud server), so that people can reach out to it whenever need. The access of editing can be restricted as per requirement.
If you reading till now, then you definitely be willing to make records of your work. But our goal is not only to keep the record but also to maintain the same with regular update of all the changes happening in the project.
Who can predict the future ??? May be someday while publishing your work this documentation will help you to keep your presentation/publication more lively.
Feel free to share your knowledge, feedback or any comments that you think needed here. Our goal is to grow and learn together.