Deadly Sins of Technical Documentation

Abstract

During the latter-half of 2003, the authors embarked on a project aimed at establishing objective answers to a seemingly ethereal but straightforward question: by what criteria can you tell you have produced a high-quality document? In the process of their research, the authors discovered there were consistent patterns of clear and obvious errors to be avoided when producing technical documentation; this paper is an effort to share their conclusions. While their particular area of interest is technical documentation within the realm of software engineering, their findings have broader applicability.