40 Helens agree: making things is exciting and fun! The sometimes tedious and often thankless work of maintaining them over the long term is less fun, but just as necessary. This is especially true for documentation.

The documentation: it is written. Written, edited, reviewed, revised, re-reviewed, approved, approved again, and then published. Success! Thank everything we never have to do that again. Or do we? In a rapidly changing technological world, of course we do.

We’ve all had the experience of trying to find documentation for something we’re trying to use and discovering that it’s out-of-date, for a previous version, no longer relevant, or for features that no longer exist. Creating new things is exciting. Maintaining, monitoring, reviewing existing things in the long term is a less exciting venture, but critical to the long-term success of your projects and products.

In this talk, I will offer strategies both technical and interpersonal to better maintain and review documentation repositories over the long term.