Aug 21, 2013

Documentation? Again?

A year and a half ago I was already whining on the quality of documentation even of big companies. Since then the situation seems to get even worse!


I recently came upon this article - "Api Documentation" by Chris Parnin. The article is a research studying the fact that most developers are using StackOverflow as a main documentation source. I totally recommend to read the whole article, but here I'll just quote the main result of the study:
  • Developers may be getting as much as 50% of their documentation from Stack Overflow.
  • More examples can be found on Stack Overflow than the official documentation guide.
  • In web searches, Stack Overflow questions are visited 2x-10x more often than official documentation.