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The Software World
The Diminishing of Manual Documentation for Software Development
Prefer Integration, Automation, and Communication over Documentation
In any engineering discipline, documentation is considered essential. However, I have noticed that the role of documentation in software development has been diminishing over the years.
While we cannot completely eliminate documentation, it is true that it has evolved and transformed over the decades.
The Thick Manual Era
I still remember the days I was asked to learn to program for IBM AS/400 Machine. Its programming is pretty similar to the COBOL style. Don’t bother searching the internet for any solution it has, everything is in a think several hundreds of pages (if not thousands) manual.
The documentation is what we need to refer to, to get it working. Fortunately, I only work there as part of my undergraduate internship program. I only need to learn a tiny fraction of the system in place. I never envy the senior developer’s responsibility there.
The Waterfall Development Era
Software Engineering is a course I learned in university. I remember the steps and practice them in my…
