Documentation and Communication Standards
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Revision as of 19:27, 12 December 2013 by Joachim.baran (talk | contribs) (Basic steps to a doc/communication guideline document.)
Documentation
- document by...
- ...extending or improving existing documentation
- ...only create new documents when there is no suitable existing document in place (ask you team members)
- ...ensure that new documents can be reached via a link from the wiki main page (either directly or indirectly through a few more clicks)
- ...never lecture or explain topics that have been covered by a biology and/or computer science degree
- structure your documentation by...
- ...giving a short intro about the documents contents
- ...have a table of contents, if there are more than half a dozen headings and/or section headings
- ...sections should be topical and denoting context (e.g., machine changes, different environments s.a. development, staging or production)
- executable documentation
- log which command lines you executed (incl. directory, current user, machine)
- log the output too, if it is not too much (a dozen lines), or otherwise give an excerpt of a successful command execution
- describe what is being done (
ant dump-genes
is not helpful; but saying where the data comes from, where it is being stored, and for what this data dump can be used is helpful)
Communication
- let your senior team members know...
- ...what you are doing now
- ...what you are going to do in the next few days
- let all team members know...
- ...when you created a new document (Why? Purpose? What are the contents and future directions?)