Typical faults in bad documentation
In 1991, the Institute of Scientific and Technical Communicators published 'Quality and Professionalism in Documentation'. The article explained that technical documents often suffer from the following problems:
- Missing information
- Bad writing and ambiguous text
- A failure to anticipate the readers' problems, questions, and situation
- Bad analysis of the readers. Documents are written for the writers and their situation, not for the readers and their situation
- An incorrect technical level
- Bad formatting and bad design of the structure
- Bad indexing. The documents contain good information, but it is difficult to find
- A professional appearance that hides the bad content
- A failure to change the documentation when a product changes
- Lack of planning.
Next: Software documentation solution.
