App Overview

Structure

A Software Documentation Solution must contain a structure for capturing a representation of your Software.

Structure

Why a Software Documentation Solution Requires a Structure

Software Documentation efforts fail because there is no underlying structure for the documentation.

After many attempts to capture documentation “about” Software, we (at App Overview) realized the only way to do this was to first provide the underlying structure that allows Software Teams to capture the components that make up their software, which are the objects, relationships, logical views and groupings, hierarchies, etc.

Today, Software Teams are required to come up with a structure from scratch to document their Software. But this is not feasible. This would require every Software Team to (1) create/invent a viable model to document Software (something that has never been done until App Overview), and (2) create an application from scratch as well (UI, app layer, database layer, etc.), because current tools such as Word or Wiki would never support such a model.

Therefore, any Software Documentation Solution must provide this underlying structure for Software Teams to simply add their Software components, and then add their documentation to those components.

(Bonus: By doing it this way, you also receive an incredible benefit: the ability to visualize your software.)

But maybe the most important benefit of the underlying structure, is an intuitive and obvious place to both add, and later find, your documentation about an area of your Software. In today’s systems, just trying to find the correct place to add, and then later find, documentation becomes so time consuming, that the documentation repository is not used.

A structure that represents your Software itself gives you the most direct route to access your Software documentation, saving time, and increasing usage.

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