Living Documentation Continuous Knowledge Sharing by Design

Software documentation: a necessary evil? It needn’t be! Documentation can come to life, evolve, stay dynamic, and actually help you build better software.

This concise guide introduces and thoroughly illuminates the concept of living documentation that changes at the same pace as software design and development, from establishment of business goals to capturing domain knowledge, creating architecture, designing software, coding, and deployment. Replete with clarifying illustrations and concrete examples, it shows how to dramatically improve your documentation at minimal extra cost by using well-crafted artifacts and judicious automation.

Language- and technology-agnostic. Living Documentation borrows powerful ideas from domain-driven design, helping you customize its concepts and apply its lessons to meet your changing documentation needs in your own specific domain. Cyrille Martraire proves that you don’t have to choose between working software and comprehensive, high-quality documentation: you can have the benefits of both.

Cyrille Martraire (@cyriux on Twitter) is CTO, co-founder, and partner at Arolla (@ArollaFr on Twitter), the founder of the Paris Software Crafters community, and a regular speaker at international conferences. Cyrille refers to himself as a developer, since he has designed software since 1999 for startups, software vendors, and corporations as an employee and as a consultant.

He has worked and led multiple significant projects, mostly in capital finance, including the complete rewriting of a multilateral trading facility of interest rate swaps. In most cases he has to start from large and miserable legacy systems.

He’s passionate about software design in every aspect: test-driven development, behavior-driven development, and, in particular, domain-driven design.

Cyrille lives in Paris with his wife, Yunshan, and children, Norbert and Gustave.