Documentation-Driven Development

A former manager poses a provocative idea: end-user help topics for all new applications and features--like the sweet new Source Control Explorer window in Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System--should be written before development begins;  Help First or Documentation-Driven Development (DDD).

DDD is really no different from Test-Driven Development, about which Rob Caron recently wrote, "According to Jonathan Cogley , Test-Driven Development  (TDD) is gaining in popularity . James Newkirk , Peter Provost and Brian Button are working on a new TDD example named Bookmark Collection." In fact, I believe that DDD is perfectly congruent with the precepts of TDD.

Anticipated Benefits

  • drastically lower documentation and localization costs.
  • the ability to simul-ship EN-glish and all other language versions of Visual Studio
  • nominally lower test costs (many test cases would be pre-written by writers)
  • greater cross-product consistency
  • greater developmental productivity...no, really.

Anticipated Costs

  • pedantic, predictable documentation that explains how to do things but not why you should do them one way or another.
  • writers would have to be more technical and experienced.
  • writers would be less productive since they would be involved in more design discussions, at least in theory.
  • lower quality specs: PMs would probably shift responsibility to documentation teams.