Future work and developer documentation

Question

In your opinion, should the documents listing what further needs to be done on the application development separate from the developer documentation describing design decisions and algorithms? It would be great to also explain the reason for the opinion on why it's clearer to do or not do so. Thanks in advance for the comments.

Answer 1

Yes, documentation of the existing system and documentation of prospective future changes should be separate.

The most important documentation is what the current system is, and what it does. Prospective changes don't provide anything of value from a maintenance perspective - just clutter. Prospective changes may be determined to be of lesser importance depending on various factors (most likely being money to fund), and timelines are adjusted accordingly.