This article is based on a presentation given by Michelle Irvine at the 2024 Write the Docs conference.
Technical documentation matters — but how do you convince your colleagues that it does?
If this question has you stumped time and again, you’ll be delighted to learn that documentation has a tangible impact — and you can cite numbers to prove it.
Michelle Irvine, a technical writer at Google Cloud, has spent the past several years conducting research to demonstrate the impact of internal documentation for the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) program. Through her research on software development, delivery, and operation across industries ranging from technology to education, Irvine has found that documentation consistently affects all technical practices. According to Irvine, teams that produce high-quality documentation are:
• 3.8 times more likely to implement security practices
• 2.5 times more likely to fully leverage the cloud
• 2.4 times more likely to meet or exceed reliability targets
• 3.5 times more likely to implement Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices (Source: Irvine, 2024)
Remarkably, even low-quality documentation has a positive impact on organizational performance, resulting in continuous integration (CI) efforts having a 34% impact on revenue and customer satisfaction. High-quality documentation magnifies this impact, with CI efforts having a 750% impact on revenue and customer satisfaction. Across the board, teams that produce high-quality documentation also see higher levels of productivity and job satisfaction and lower levels of burnout. These patterns, says Irvine, are persistent and play out globally across companies of all sizes.
So what does all of this data mean for you?
If you’ve been trying to convince your colleagues and managers to invest in documentation efforts, Irvine’s research could be the starting point for conversations about increasing your budget, hiring more technical writers, and making many other decisions that support you in your work. The research is publicly available, so familiarize yourself with the data by watching Irvine’s presentation on DORA findings and browsing the reports at dora.dev. You can find additional support by joining the DORA community of practice at dora.community. Finally, when you’ve done your homework, share the presentation and reports with your colleagues for game-changing conversations about stepping up documentation efforts.
The impact of documentation is extensive, measurable, and proven — so dig into the data and use it to your advantage!
Melissa Huang is a communications professional with over 6 years of experience in higher education and nonprofit environments. She is a volunteer for the STC Canada West Coast chapter.