The project team is slogging through an invisible morass and its bus factor (https://goo.gl/68Lis6) is approaching zero (critical information is lost even though no one left the team). If this seems familiar to you, you may be suffering from the effects of poor documentation whether you know it or not. You can prevent this scourge, but getting your team to invest in documentation may not be easy. Come to this session and find out how to sell the value of good docs and how to produce them. Avoid dead documentation just as you would dead code, by understanding what to include, what to leave out, and how to create living documentation that never goes stale. Practical techniques based on real world experience will be presented, with plenty of examples. Start raising your project's bus factor today.

I feel very strongly that project documentation is a critical part to project success. Unfortunately, it is often neglected or worse, not done at all.

Over the past several years while working as a senior dev/architect, I took the initiative to write/update/maintain documentation for my client's projects and the net effect of those efforts on those projects is very positive. Based on these experiences, I want to share my knowledge with others and evangelize the importance of documentation.

This will be an updated version of my "Effectively Documenting your Development Project" presentation that will put additional focus selling the value of docs and on preventing a bad bus factor. I presented the prior version of this talk at CodePaLOUsa, Path to Agility and DogFoodCon, each time to large and very attentive audiences so I believe this topic will resonate with CodeMash attendees.