Long-term Documentation Maintenance: Critically Necessary, Deeply Underappreciated

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all had the experience of trying to find documentation for something we're trying to use and discovering that it's out-of-date, for a previous version, no longer relevant, or for features that no longer exist.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.