Why is documentation important? I would have thought it self-evident but as recently as last week I had to explain it to a group of engineers. They had a “lone warrior engineer” that was regarded as a wizard. A lot of the other engineers wouldn’t touch his stuff because they didn’t understand it, as if they believed his work was too brilliant for their comprehension. In reality this was not the case, he just had not bothered to document and communicated what he was doing.

This gave the “lone warrior engineer” engineer great job security. This gave the business a single point of failure that could be extremely costly meaning that if the engineer quit or was otherwise “hit by a bus” the business would have significant difficulty maintaining what that engineer had built.

A big part of the value I add to businesses is to prevent problems like this from popping up by ensuring the flow of knowledge does not get stuck in any one engineer's head when it should be documented and communicated to the team.

Right now I am on a bit of a diagramming kick since I started writing that diagramming software. So I think I will do a series on some of my favorite tools for visually documenting how a system should look.

This will include Network Diagrams, Swimlane Flowcharts and Entity Relationship Diagrams. Looking forward to doing a deeper dive with you. ~Cheers

PS: If you are interested in engaging my services as a Web Application Architect check out my Group Coaching Program or 1 on 1 Consulting at schematical.com and check out my FREE eBook 20 Things You Can DoTo Save Money On Your Amazon Web Services Bill Today