Continuous system and user documentation integration

Formal user and system documentation is often completely ignored by development teams. This is a direct result of the pain standard documentation tools and processes cause to technical teams. Traditional documentation models hamper the velocity of development. User and/or system documentation is often created and maintained using clunky binary files (i.e. *.docx). Generally, collaboration systems include passing updated versions through long email chains, or network file shares. Additionally, proprietary formats tend to suffer from inconsistencies across operating systems, which can lead to data corruption across teams with disparate work environments. Storing binary files in version control systems is a solution to some of these problems, but versioning binary files is still challenging. Automating and integrating this into a software development life cycle is problematic at best, often resulting in documents languishing behind the pace of a project, or being deprecated entirely. In our organization, we developed a new process to rapidly produce PDFs, HTML, and Word-based documentation from multiple authors and integrated it with our existing automated build system. The process is tool/environment independent and takes full advantage of a version control system. This has increased our efficiency, communication and collaboration in an oft-overlooked area in the software development process.