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Documentation and Style

We’ve combined two topics into a single chapter. They’re often looked at as ”extras” in a project’s life-cycle. The deliverable code is often considered to be the most important thing.

Some developers will try to argue that test cases and documentation aren’t the code with which the user interacts, and therefore, these additional pieces aren’t as important as the code.

This is false.

While it is true the users don’t interact directly with test cases, the presence of test cases is what gives people the confidence to use the code. Without the test cases, there’s no evidence the code does anything useful at all.

Documentation provides essential information that can – eventually – be extracted from the code. A project with a prominent docs folder is considerably more trustworthy than a project that lacks documentation.

Code ”style” is a relatively...