What comes to mind when you hear the words better engineering? For many in the software industry, engineering improvements mean optimizing DevOps. Accelerated development and smaller releases mean faster production of features that customers want with fewer defects. Better engineering might also mean the adoption of modern software architectures, such as containers and microservices, running on highly scalable cloud architectures. But reaching promised levels of efficiency and improvement has proven challenging for many organizations.
How many software industry professionals draw the connection between better engineering and their internal documentation? Spoiler alert: The answer is far too few.
Why? Because software documentation is commonly an afterthought. It’s typically written by the development teams themselves. And in many cases, code and process documentation is nothing more than a collection of notes that individual engineers jot down to keep track of their own efforts. But there’s a certain magic that happens when a tech writer is brought on board to clean up, complete, and standardize internal documentation. When a writer starts asking what software features do, how the system is organized, the purpose and benefits of the design, etc., all in an effort to document what’s there, the engineers who created the technology start seeing their own code in a new light, and improvements happen organically.
When you focus on technical communication excellence, better engineering becomes a natural byproduct of the process. And your organization, teams, products, and customers all benefit in multiple ways from the enriched technology that is produced.
Train Employees Faster (and Better) with Accurate Documentation
Software development has one of the highest turnover rates in technology at an average of 13.2%. Some subdisciplines within software reach extremely high turnover rates, such as user experience (UX) designers at 23.3%. Much of that turnover happens in the first 90 or 180 days, so it’s crucial that your existing engineers quickly train and integrate new team members while staying productive themselves.
The best way to create a fast and effective on-ramp is to have up-to-date, accurate, and actionable engineering documentation. When you provide a new engineer with adequate documentation, you reduce the amount of one-on-one time they need with your engineering leads, and you equip them with the foundational knowledge to help them ask productive questions. Your established engineers end up with more time to continue their own work and keep schedules on track, while your new engineers become productive team members faster, and feel like they’re a valuable part of the team sooner. And they’ll be less likely to introduce code defects right out of the gate, which helps keep your quality metrics high and leads to better engineering.
Pro Tip: Great Training Documentation Improves Employee Retention
It makes sense that great documentation helps new employees come up to speed quickly, but did you know that moving your documentation to an online training platform can improve employee retention? Learning management systems (LMS) that allow employees to study at their own pace and learn at work – especially those LMS that are fun and rewarding – help improve training efficiency by up to 93% and can increase employee retention by up to 92%. But you have to start documentation!
Reduce Design Flaws
When you bring in a tech writer, they start asking questions, which makes your engineers think about their designs and coding practices. Often, these discussions lead engineers to uncover design flaws, organizational issues, architectural limitations, or naming conflicts. These issues, once identified, can be addressed and refactored, which improves the overall design of the application and reduces the likelihood of future design flaws.
The earlier you bring in a writer, the better. However, if your engineers are having difficulty making improvements or adding features, the addition of an expert tech writer can help your engineers uncover architectural limitations quickly. Writers specialize in aggregating and organizing information in ways that make missing information more apparent, and simpler for newcomers to understand. So before you engage in redesign or refactoring efforts, consider adding a good tech writer to your team.
Pro Tip: Before Moving to Microservices, Hire a Tech Writer
One of the most common refactoring exercises across the industry is a migration to a microservices architecture. Applications that remain relevant for users yet still exist in their monolithic form run the risk of being outpaced by competing products. Moving to microservices means offering customers a familiar experience while improving back-end processing to take advantage of agile, cost-effective cloud services. But as you make that move, make sure you have a tech writer to help you document the process. They help you refine and polish your lexicon, improve consistency, and help ensure that requirements, constraints, processes, and design elements are captured, described, and cataloged accurately.
Improve the User Experience
Great user experiences start with the initial software design. When writers are brought in at the beginning of a project, their perspectives can help shape the code architecture from its inception. Tech writers are often responsible for customer-facing documentation as well as internal docs, so they’ll bring the perspective of the customer to your product team. This added voice helps engineers recognize changes they can make to the design to simplify software for the end user. The result is an enriched solution that more customers love, and one that is less prone to needing costly refactoring efforts in the future.
Pro Tip: Designing a User Interface? Don’t Forget the UX Writer!
A UX writer creates conventions and enforces consistency across user interfaces while delivering in-app language that speaks to users at a level they’ll understand. A UX writer complements the UX design team by keeping the customer perspective in the conversation while also keeping an eye on branding tone and voice. They help ensure that there are no disjointed, conflicting, or missing messages as the user navigates through a software solution, app, or website, and they can help ensure that the language between all user interfaces remains consistent and helpful to the user.
Ready for Better Engineering?
Hiring a tech writer can help you onboard and train new engineers, improve engineering practices, and enrich your technology solutions. But that’s just a few of the benefits of great technical writing. Take a look at our article, Tangible Benefits of Technical Communication Excellence. You’ll discover the many ways a good tech writer brings value to your teams, products, and customers.
If you’re ready for better engineering through improved technical communication, talk to us. Expert Support is THE technical writing company. We recruit, hire, and train technical writers who know software. Our writers produce documentation that helps you produce complete and accurate internal documentation, improves customer satisfaction with exceptional customer-facing documents, reduces your support costs, and more.