However hard you work on documentation, it won't work for your software - unless you do it the right way.

   There is a secret that needs to be understood in order to write good software documentation: there isn’t one thing called documentation, there are four. 

• They are: tutorials, how-to guides, explanation and technical reference. They represent four different purposes or functions, and require four different approaches to their creation. Understanding the implications of this will help improve most software documentation - often immensely.

It doesn’t matter how good your software is, because if the documentation is not good enough, people will not use it.

Even if for some reason they have to use it because they have no choice, without good documentation, they won’t use it effectively or the way you’d like them to.

Nearly everyone understands this. Nearly everyone knows that that they need good documentation, and most people try to create good documentation.

And most people fail.

Usually, it’s not because they don’t try hard enough. Usually, it’s because they are not doing it the right way.

In this article I will explain how you can make your documentation better, not by working harder at it, but by doing it the right way. The right way is the easier way - easier to write, and easier to maintain.

There are some very simple principles that govern documentation that are very rarely if ever spelled out. They seem to be a secret, though they shouldn’t be.