The Knowledge: Towards a Culture of Engineering Documentation

For several years, Google's internal surveys identified the lack of trustworthy, discoverable documentation as the #1 problem impacting internal developer productivity. We're not alone: Stack Overflow's 2016 survey ranked ""Poor documentation"" as the #2 problem facing engineers.

Solving this problem is tough. It's not enough to build tooling; the culture needs to change. Google internal engineering is attacking the challenge three ways: Building a documentation platform; integrating that platform into the engineering toolchain; and building a culture where documentation - like testing - is accepted as a natural, required part of the development process.

In this talk, we'll share our learnings and best practices around both tooling and culture, the evolution of documentation, and some thoughts about how we can transition from the creation of documents towards an ecosystem where context-appropriate, trustworthy documentation is reliably and effortlessly available to the engineers that need it.

Riona MacNamara is a staff technical writer at Google. She leads Google's Documentation Infrastructure team, which aims to make internal engineers happier and more productive by fully integrating the creation, maintenance, and discovery of engineering information into our development workflow and culture. She previously worked at Amazon and Microsoft.