How do you deal with documentation debt and legacy systems?

1 What is documentation debt?

Documentation debt is the gap between the current state of your software and its documentation. It occurs when you do not update, review, or improve your documentation as your software evolves. Documentation debt can lead to inaccurate, incomplete, or outdated information that confuses or misleads your users and stakeholders. It can also increase the risk of errors, bugs, and security issues in your software.

2 What are legacy systems?

Legacy systems are software systems that are still in use but are based on outdated or obsolete technologies, architectures, or standards. They may have been developed by different teams, vendors, or methodologies over time. Legacy systems can be difficult to integrate, modify, or maintain due to their complexity, dependencies, or lack of documentation. They can also pose performance, compatibility, or security problems for your users and customers.

3 Why are they problematic?

Documentation debt and legacy systems can have a negative effect on the quality and value of your software products and documentation. This can lead to a decrease in user satisfaction and trust in your software and documentation, as well as an increase in support and maintenance costs. Furthermore, these issues can impede innovation and collaboration between development and documentation teams, hinder compliance with accessibility standards, and expose your software and documentation to potential legal, ethical, or reputational risks.

4 How can you measure them?

To effectively manage documentation debt and legacy systems, you must measure them first. To do this, you can utilize various metrics and tools to assess the state and impact of your documentation debt and legacy systems. These include documentation coverage, which is the percentage of software features, functions, or components that have documentation; documentation quality, which is the accuracy, completeness, clarity, consistency, and relevance of your documentation; documentation feedback, which are comments, ratings, or issues reported by users and stakeholders on your documentation; software complexity, which is the number of lines of code, dependencies, modules, or interfaces in your software; software quality, which is the reliability, usability, security, and performance of your software; and software feedback from users and customers on your software.

5 How can you reduce them?

In order to reduce documentation debt and legacy systems, a proactive and iterative approach to documentation and software development processes should be adopted. Strategies such as prioritizing and updating documentation based on user needs, feedback, and analytics; reviewing and refactoring to eliminate redundancies, errors, or inconsistencies; using clear and consistent standards, styles, and formats; automating with tools to generate, manage, or test; migrating or replacing legacy systems with modern technologies, architectures, or standards; using modular and scalable design principles for software development; using version control and documentation management systems to track changes in software; and utilizing testing and debugging tools to identify and fix errors or bugs can all help reduce them.

6 How can you prevent them?

In order to prevent documentation debt and legacy systems, you should adopt a culture of documentation and software quality in your organization. This can be achieved by aligning your documentation and software goals with user and business needs, involving users and stakeholders in the design, development, and evaluation processes, educating and training your teams on best practices, tools, and standards, collaborating and communicating effectively, allocating sufficient time, budget, and resources for activities, and regularly evaluating and improving processes and outcomes.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?