How should a one-man development shop document their code?

Posted by CKoenig on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by CKoenig
Published on 2009-04-17T05:04:56Z Indexed on 2010/05/15 4:24 UTC
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Hi,

please let me first describe my situation. I work in an IT department for a small-to-medium sized industrial-company and basically I'm the only real developer (sometimes a second guy joins in for his own projects). I programm mostly in C#/.net. Of course I only programm for internal need (Intranet, reporting, data-driven apps, some mobile apps, ...).

My question is how should I document my work? It's a highly dynamic environment (the features and bug fixes I implement are tested by me during production, and go live, often within a day. If I technical documentation like MSDN or even overview diagramms those would take me more time to sync than the whole programming process.

Also I feel it's a waste of time because I would be the only one who ever read it.

I do understand that if I get sick, leave, or forget this documentation would be valuable.

PS:well of course you are right - the quesion is how much and how/where.

I try using the XML-docu comments for the public exposed parts but as I'm a believer in self-documenting code the comments mostly restates in plain text what you can read from the method-head itself :(Maybe using the remarks section is the key but if you have 30 lines of code with a 15 line xml-comment in front it just looks dirty

(sorry for posting it here but our firewall rejects JSON :( )

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