Best Practice: Documentation Standards

Question

Hello there,

Here is the issue, I need to find/think of documentation standards for our team. We have several needs, we need documentation standards for Requirements Documentation, Technical Documentation - for projects and Code Style Documentation - for developers which would cover how developers should name, and organize the project's code (should he use regions? How should naming look? etc.), I know it can vary from project to project, but maybe there are some kind of standards for that. Currently each developer writes it as he imagines, and that is not so good, because it is inconsistent, and with different styles etc.

I'm curious how you/your company does that. And maybe there is some kind of standards for that.

How it should look? What content should it include? etc..

BTW we use .NET Technologies.

Answer 1

Brad Abrams posted an example of an internal Microsoft coding guideline on his blog several years ago: http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/articles/361363.aspx

See also the Microsoft Design Guidelines for Developing Class Libraries http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms229042.aspx

Answer 2

It doesn't exatcly match your needs, and is focused more on the web development angle, but I asked a similar question yesterday whose results may interest you: Here

Answer 3

Here is a very good book: Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications.