New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: How do you document complex software systems?

Ask HN: How do you document complex software systems?
4 by el_benhameen | 0 comments on Hacker News.
We have a codebase that’s fairly well documented. But the infrastructure it’s deployed to and the deployment process itself are not as well documented, and it interacts with other systems in ways that are not well documented or well understood by all of the dev team. Developers who join the project can struggle to understand the full implications of their changes, and developing an understanding of the system as a whole is some combination of reading the code, poking around the infrastructure, finding possibly-outdated documentation that might live in various places, and asking the right people. If someone changes something or someone leaves the team, that makes discoverability even more difficult. So: 1. Where do you document system architecture and the interactions between systems? 2. What does the documentation look like? Diagrams? Text? A combination of the two, or something else entirely? 3. Whose job is it to maintain that documentation?

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