As a first post to this blog (See the about page for links to my previous blogs) I would like to go though my journey of Documentation technologies that I have tried.
I have worked in the IT sector for many years and it seems that the default method of doing documentation has always been Microsoft Word documents, which I’m sure a lot of you and myself included are still using today. This is because Businesses tend to use this as the default method of documenting anything.
So what is wrong with Word documents. Not a lot really, it does what it is suppose to do. Which is replicate the printed page on the screen.
To me, this seemed like an archaic method of doing documentation, there must be other means. This is when I came across Tiddly Wiki. This was about 10 years ago, it seemed very easy to use, I started playing around with it, but I could not use it because business wants Word Documents. So I dropped it. I have just started using Tiddly Wiki again for my personal notes. Adding Dropbox and I have my personal notes everywhere I go.
A little while later, I came across DocBook. DocBook is an documentation format in XML. I tried writing a post back in 2011, Message Tracking. I liked the idea of DocBook. You can write your content in the XML and use css to change the format. You can then output the document as either HTML, PDF, word and most likely several other formats. I haven’t really touched on it since, but I do like the idea. It means that your documentation format is decoupled from the format. Maybe one of these days I’ll look into it again.
The next format I started looking at which is more common is the Wiki. I think the humble wiki is probably the best method to do your documentation. There are many open source wiki’s available on different platforms, but the one I like most is from a company in my home country, Atlassians Confluence. Everyone can collaborate on a wiki. No need to email documents around (Yes, I know you can use something like SVN to keep the store documents in a common area, but it is still difficult to navigate and search.)
I had been searching for a better way to do Specification documents. I was trying to find a template on the Internet. I didn’t quite like the way that our company did them. There seemed to be too much fluff and not enough content. This is when I got exposure to the whole Specification by example movement. From this, I came across Fitnesse and Concordion. These two products allow you to create executable documents. Documents that can be used to test your applications that you have developed. Fitnesse uses a wiki to hold the documentation portion and Concordion uses HTML pages. These seem the best methods I have come across to document your systems. They are always up to date as they are part of the testing process. The only downside I have come across with these products is… they don’t use Word, so it makes it hard for business types to accept. Oh well. I have done some proof of concepts with both Fitnesse and Concordion. At some point I’ll put up a tutorial on how to use them.
The final type of documentation technology I would like to talk about isMarkdown. Markdown is a text format that can be rendered with the right software to HTML. I like it because it is easy to read as a text file, but can also be rendered to HTML. For example, this blog post is being written in Markdown. As a proof of concept I have used Markdown for comments in SoftwareAG’s WebMethods. I then wrote a python script that takes those comments and renders it to HTML. With extensions, which included adding the js-sequence-diagram.js library, I was able to add sequence diagrams to the output.
That is it for the first post. I have lots of topics I would like to cover, unfortunately I don’t have a lot of time. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep up the content.
