Here’s what the 2024 DORA report has to say about code documentation
Blog post from Swimm
The 2024 DORA report underscores the vital role of high-quality documentation in enhancing developer productivity and organizational performance within the software development lifecycle. The research highlights that reliable documentation reduces the time developers spend searching for information, thereby increasing team efficiency and job satisfaction while streamlining onboarding for new hires. The report also explores the transformative impact of AI on documentation practices, noting a 25% increase in AI adoption leads to a 7.5% improvement in documentation quality, although it can reduce delivery throughput and stability. Swimm aligns with these findings by leveraging AI and static code analysis to generate context-aware documentation that remains up to date as code evolves, thus bridging the gap between code and its business rationale. Despite the Agile manifesto's emphasis on working software over comprehensive documentation, the report reaffirms the importance of integrating documentation into the development workflow to improve team performance, with actionable insights for engineering leaders to prioritize and measure the impact of documentation practices.