Solving a Common Dev Grievance: Architecture Documentation

The global developer population is expected to reach 28.7 million people by 2024, surpassing the entire population of Australia.

Among such a large group, achieving unanimous agreement on anything is remarkable. Yet, there's widespread consensus on one point: good technical documentation is crucial and saves considerable time. Some even consider it a cornerstone of engineering success, acting as a vital link between ideas, people, and visions.

Despite this, many developers battle daily with poor, incomplete, or inaccurate documentation. It’s a common grievance in the tech community, where developers lament the hours spent on documentation, searching scattered sources for information, or enduring unnecessary meetings to piece together disjointed details.

Vadim Kravcenko in his essay on Healthy Documentation highlights a pervasive issue: 

“The constant need to have meetings is a symptom of a deeper problem — a lack of clear, accessible, and reliable documentation. A well-documented workflow doesn't need an hour-long session for clarification. A well-documented decision doesn't need a room full of people to understand its rationale. A well-documented knowledge base doesn't need a group huddle whenever a new member joins the team.”

Documentation, especially that of system architecture, is often seen as a burdensome afterthought, fraught with tedious manual diagramming and verbose records spread across various platforms.

It’s important to highlight that bad documentation is not just a source of frustration for developers, but it also has a very tangible business impact. After all, time is money. When developers waste time manually recording information or looking for something in vain, they are being diverted from building new features, optimizing performance, and, in general, producing value for end users.

This article examines the evolving requirements of modern system architecture documentation and how system architecture observability might be a way to reduce overhead for teams and provide them with the information they need when they need it.

Why System Architecture Documentation Is Important

System documentation is crucial as it captures all aspects of a software system’s development life cycle, from initial requirements and design to implementation and deployment.

There are two primary benefits of comprehensive system architecture documentation:

1. Empowers All Stakeholders While Saving Time

System design is inherently collaborative, requiring inputs from various stakeholders to ensure the software system meets all business and technical requirements while remaining feasible and maintainable. Documentation serves different needs for different stakeholders:

• New Team Additions: Comprehensive documentation helps new members quickly understand the system's architecture, technical decisions, and operational logic, facilitating smoother and faster onboarding.
• Existing Engineering Team: Serves as a consistent reference, guiding the team's implementation efforts and reducing the frequency of disruptive clarification meetings.
• Cross-Functional Teams: Enables teams from different functional areas to understand the system’s behavior and integration points, which is crucial for coordinated development efforts.
• Security Teams and External Auditors: Documentation provides the necessary details for compliance checks, security audits, and certifications, detailing the system’s structure and security measures.

Effective documentation ensures that all team members, regardless of their role, can access and utilize crucial project information, enhancing overall collaboration and efficiency.

2. Persisted, Single Source of Company Knowledge

A dynamic, comprehensive repository of system knowledge helps mitigate risks associated with personnel changes, code redundancy, and security vulnerabilities. It preserves critical knowledge, preventing the 'single point of failure' scenario where departing team members leave a knowledge vacuum. This central source of truth also streamlines problem-solving and minimizes time spent on context-switching, duplicated efforts, and unnecessary meetings.

By centralizing system information across various platforms — like Jira, GitHub, Confluence, and Slack — teams can avoid the pitfalls of fragmented knowledge and ensure that everyone has access to the latest, most accurate system information.

Modern Systems Have Outgrown Traditional Documentation

The requirements for system architecture documentation have evolved dramatically from 20 or even 10 years ago. The scale, complexity, and distribution of modern systems render traditional documentation methods inadequate. Previously, a team might grasp a system's architecture, dependencies, and integrations by reviewing a static diagram, skimming the codebase, and browsing through some decision records. Today, such an approach is insufficient due to the complexity and dynamic nature of contemporary systems.

Increased Technological Complexity

Modern technologies have revolutionized system architecture. The rise of distributed architectures, cloud-native applications, SaaS, APIs, and composable platforms has added layers of complexity. Additionally, the aging of software and the proliferation of legacy systems necessitate continual evolution and integration. This technological diversity and modularity increase interdependencies and complicate the system's communication structure, making traditional diagramming tools inadequate for capturing and understanding the full scope of system behaviors.

Accelerated System Evolution

The adoption of Agile methodologies and modern design practices like Continuous and Evolutionary Architecture has significantly increased the rate of change within software systems. Teams have to update their systems to reflect changes in external infrastructure, new technologies, evolving business requirements, or a plethora of other aspects that might change during the lifetime of any software system. That’s why a dynamic documentation approach that can keep pace with rapid developments is necessary.

Changing Engineering Team Dynamics

The globalization of the workforce and the demand from users for global, scalable, and performant applications have led to more distributed engineering teams. Coordinating across different cross-functional teams, offices, and time zones, introduces numerous communication challenges.

The opportunity for misunderstandings and failures becomes an order N squared problem: adding a 10th person to a team adds 9 new lines of communication to worry about. That’s also reflected in the famous Fred Brooks quote from the The Mythical Man-Month book: “Adding [human] power to a late software project makes it later.”

This complexity is compounded by the industry's high turnover rate, with developers often changing roles every 1 to 2 years, underscoring the necessity for robust, accessible documentation.

New Requirements of System Architecture Documentation

System architecture documentation should be accurate, current, understandable, maintainable, easy to access, and relevant. Despite these goals, traditional documentation methods have often fallen short due to several inherent challenges:

• Human Error and Inconsistencies: Relying on individuals, whether software architects, technical writers, or developers, to document system architecture introduces human error, inconsistencies, and quickly outdated information. These issues are compounded by barriers such as interpersonal communication, lack of motivation, insufficient technical writing skills, or time constraints.
• Documentation as Code: While self-documenting code is a step forward, using comments to clarify code logic can only provide so much clarity. It lacks critical contextual information like decision rationales or system-wide implications.
• Fragmented Tooling: Documentation generators that scan source code and other artifacts can create documentation based on predefined templates and rules. However, these tools often provide fragmented views of the system, requiring manual efforts to integrate and update disparate pieces of information.

The complexity and dynamism of modern software systems intensify these documentation challenges. In response, new requirements have emerged:

• Automation: Documentation processes need to minimize manual efforts, allowing for the automatic creation and maintenance of diagrams, component details, and decision records. Tools should enable the production of interactive, comprehensive visuals quickly and efficiently.
• Reliability and Real-Time Updates: Documentation must not only be reliable but also reflect real-time system states. This is essential to empowering engineers to make accurate, informed decisions based on the current state of the system. This immediacy helps troubleshoot issues efficiently and prevents wasted effort on tasks based on outdated information.
• Collaborative Features: Modern tooling must support both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration across distributed teams, incorporating features like version control and advanced search capabilities to manage and navigate documentation easily.

In today's fast-paced software development environment, documentation should evolve alongside the systems it describes, facilitating seamless updates without imposing additional overhead on engineering teams.

Observability Could Solve the Biggest Pain Points

Leveraging observability could be the key to keeping system architecture documentation current while significantly reducing the manual overhead for engineering teams. The growing adoption of open standards, such as OpenTelemetry (OTel), is crucial here. These standards enhance interoperability among various tools and platforms, simplifying the integration and functionality of observability infrastructures.

Imagine a scenario where adding just a few lines of code to your system allows a tool to automatically discover, track, and detect drift in your architecture, dependencies, and APIs. Such technology not only exists but is becoming increasingly accessible.

Building software at scale remains a formidable challenge. It's clear that merely increasing the number of engineers, or pursing traditional approaches to technical documentation doesn’t equate to better software — what's needed are more effective tools.

Developers deserve advanced tools that enable them to visualize, document, and explore their systems’ architecture effortlessly.

Just as modern technology has exponentially increased the productivity of end-users, innovative tools for system design and documentation are poised to do the same for developers, transforming their capacity to manage and evolve complex systems.