How Continuous Documentation Is A Game-Changer for Dev Teams

Code documentation is now a part of the landscape of code development and its importance is accepted by developers and engineers across the globe.   

Swimm specializes in helping engineering teams sync with code so that your code documentation is always up to date. Whether it’s onboarding a new team member to bring them up to speed on any codebase or when developers switch projects and work on some part of the code they are unfamiliar with, Swimm’s platform brings the latest technology in syncing teams with code to work more efficiently. 

What Is Continuous Documentation?

Continuous Documentation is a methodology for creating, maintaining, and integrating code documentation in the normal development workflow. When developers generate code, it’s not always easy or apparent for other developers to figure out what is going on or what was the rationale for writing the code in a particular way without documentation. Even when developers themselves write code, they may actually not remember what they wrote months or years ago and the direction they were going in, and why. This limits engineering teams, resulting in frustration and loads of wasted time. Even if there are code comments or inline documentation, in most cases it is just lacking in information or completely out of date, so that team members are unable to trust whether the information is accurate, up-to-date, and even relevant.

Here’s how Swimm works with Continuous Documentation: Swimm’s platform connects to GitHub, your IDE, and CI so that documentation is code-coupled, explicitly referencing a part of the code; documentation is always up to date and correct, and documentation is written and created when the code is fresh and clear in your mind – not as an afterthought. 

Imagine this scenario – an engineer sitting next to you and walking you through the code, explaining everything. With most developers and engineering teams busier than ever, the time, effort, and person power for this type of code tour is not feasible. Walkthrough Documentation takes developers on a “walk or tour” of at least two stations within your codebase: recurring code patterns and other interactions between parts of the code. This allows teams to quickly get familiar with a codebase and is usually a positive impetus for helping developers get started and begin working on documentation. 

How is Swimm a Game Changer for Engineering Teams?

The wins with Swimm’s platform are numerous:

  1. Documentation with Swimm is straightforward and a much more intuitive approach to working on documentation.
  2. Improving developer productivity and fostering a more collaborative culture for teams working on code. GitHub’s 2021 State of the Octoberse confirmed the importance of documentation – with a 50% productivity increase for developers with access to good documentation. 
  3. Allowing you to create and edit docs that are coupled with your code and auto-synced so that developers can pick up on a project where other developers left off and trust the documentation they are both reviewing and editing.
  4. Knowledge and code sharing mean faster onboarding, but also a quicker overall understanding of a codebase – something you cannot put a price tag on.
  5. Bringing companies the peace of mind of knowing that if a developer leaves, years of code won’t go out the door, too. The existing team can dive back in at any time and see what all previous team members have done and read about where a previous bug existed and why a particular code snippet was changed to fix a bug. 

Building stronger software development organizations with documentation is definitely a game changer. You too can become part of Swimm’s growing developer community and check out Swimm’s free beta for yourself. It’s easy and as straightforward as ever to help your developers swim with Swimm.