Weekly Journal 20 - Documentation

Synopsis

Spent a bit of time of this week updating documentation.

Documentation

We have been going through a number of compliance assessments lately, and one of the recurring themes we are seeing in the results is that we need to do improve our documentation. We are a fairly small team, so we have been able to get away with sharing information informally, but as we continue to grow having solid documentation becomes important.

First, if you are going for any form of compliance certification a big part of the audit will involve a review of your documentation. The auditors will want to ensure that your processes are properly documented, and that you properly track and document changes to your systems.

Right behind that is customers. If you want to do business with big companies you will need to prove to them that you know what you are doing, and that you will be a responsible vendor. That means having solid documentation you can share with them when they perform their vendor due-diligence reviews.

At a minimum you should have all your major processes documented, and have a way to trace changes in your systems. Ideally this means you can track a new feature for bug fix from the initial idea, through development and testing, and through deployment to production.

Having good documentation is like eating your vegetables. It may not be your favorite thing to work on, but it is important that you do it and do it well.

What’s Next?

This coming week is going to be about tying up loose ends, so I doubt I’ll get to work on anything fun.