Measuring documentation quality -- a rubric for developer docs
Here’s the intro:
As you set goals for your role or team, you might want to measure your impact on documentation quality in some way. The main reason for measuring your impact should be to evaluate your progress against documentation improvement goals. If you don’t have any data to provide feedback on your efforts, it’s hard to know if you’re making a difference.
Also, metrics are essential for business reasons: upper management will invariably ask you for metrics of some kind (because what you can’t measure, you can’t manage). Metrics will also be key if you’re making the case for a promotion (leveling up) or defending your performance during annual review time. Ultimately, though, you need metrics to answer this question: Is what I’m doing making a difference?
Despite the importance of metrics about documentation quality, they are an elusive, holy-grail type task that almost no one in the industry has nailed down. How do you know if your docs are any good? Few can answer this question in any objective way. In this section, I’ll provide a strategy for making metrics more approachable by scoring docs against a rubric of best practices.
Read more here: Measuring progress against documentation quality goals – a practical checklist to evaluate documentation.
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About Tom Johnson
I'm an API technical writer based in the Seattle area. On this blog, I write about topics related to technical writing and communication — such as software documentation, API documentation, AI, information architecture, content strategy, writing processes, agent skills, tech comm careers, and more. Check out my AI courses for more on the latest in AI and tech comm. If you're looking for info about documenting APIs, see my API documentation course.
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Finally, I want to note a couple of things. I usually write the first drafts of my posts myself and then use AI to improve accuracy, clarity, and detail in places, so my writing is a mix of human and AI. (Hopefully that's not too off-putting.) Also, the opinions I express on my blog are my own perspectives, not those of my employer.