Overlooking Documentation? Discover How It Can Transform Your Project’s Success
 |
By Kory Hoang, Technical Leader at Groove Technology
Hi, I’m Kory Hoang, and I’ve had the privilege of working as a Technical Leader at Groove Technology for several large-scale e-commerce projects. Over the years, I’ve worked and learned a lot about what makes these projects succeed—and just as importantly, what can make them fail. One of the most critical lessons I’ve learned is the importance of documentation.
When you’re knee-deep in the day-to-day tasks of building, optimizing, and scaling an e-commerce platform, it’s easy to push documentation aside. After all, it’s not as exciting as launching new features or handling massive traffic spikes. But from mydone
experience, good documentation is essential for keeping a project on track and preventing future headaches.
In this blog, I want to share some of my personal insights into why documentation is such a critical part of our success, backed up with real-world examples of what happens when it’s overlooked.
01. Why Documentation Matters: A Lesson I’ve Learned the Hard Way
In the beginning, I knew the importance of documentation but didn’t always prioritize documentation. Like many developers, I focused on solving immediate challenges—optimizing code, fixing bugs, and pushing new features. But after a few close calls and tough situations, I quickly realized how crucial documentation really is, especially in large, complex projects where even small oversights can lead to major problems.
1.1 Team Continuity: When People Leave, Documentation Stays
One of the toughest lessons I’ve learned is that teams change. People leave, new developers come in, and when that happens, having solid documentation is the difference between a smooth transition and a nightmare. I’ve seen projects delayed for weeks just because key knowledge wasn’t written down anywhere.
1.2 Scalability: You Can’t Scale Chaos
As an e-commerce platform grows, so does its complexity. New features get added, traffic increases, and third-party integrations become more important. Without documentation, scaling a platform can quickly become chaotic. A project I worked on involved handling millions of users, and we quickly realized that without detailed documentation on our system architecture, scaling was slow, risky, and painful.
This isn’t just a technical issue—it’s a business issue too. If you can’t scale efficiently, you’ll lose customers, and that’s a risk no e-commerce business can afford.
1.3 Team Collaboration: Keeping Everyone Aligned
Another key benefit of documentation is how it improves collaboration across teams. Whether it's developers, testers, project managers, or business analysts, documentation serves as a common reference point, ensuring that everyone is on the same page. When working on large projects with multiple teams, even the smallest miscommunication can lead to delays and rework. Clear documentation helps prevent this by providing a shared understanding of the architecture, design decisions, and project goals.
For example, on a recent e-commerce platform upgrade, we had multiple teams working on different modules—front-end, back-end, and database. Without solid documentation, we would have wasted a lot of time aligning everyone and clarifying responsibilities. Instead, we used well-maintained documentation to keep the teams aligned and productive.
1.4 Long-Term Project Health: Maintaining and Evolving Your Codebase
Good documentation isn’t just about the here and now—it’s critical for the long-term health of any software project. As projects evolve, new features are added, and code is refactored, having documentation ensures that future developers can understand the original intent behind decisions and continue to build on them without creating technical debt.
In long-term projects, where the codebase is maintained over years, documentation acts as a bridge between the past and the future. It provides continuity, ensuring that the project remains maintainable and scalable, even as team members change and new challenges arise.
On one of our long-running e-commerce projects, we were able to onboard new team members quickly because we had documented everything from architecture to deployment processes. This allowed us to maintain the platform's stability over time, despite team changes and evolving business needs.
02. Real Examples of What Happens When Documentation is Lacking
I’ve personally experienced what happens when documentation is overlooked, and it’s not pretty. There was a project where a colleague left, and we realized that critical API configurations and deployment processes weren’t documented. It took weeks to bring a new engineer up to speed, causing delays and headaches for the entire team.
And we’re not alone. The impact of poor documentation is real, and it’s costly. Consider these real-world examples:
eBay’s 2014 outage resulted in millions of dollars in lost sales because engineers struggled to fix an undocumented API failure during peak shopping hours.
Target’s failed Canadian expansion was partly caused by inadequate documentation in their inventory systems, leading to a $5.4 billion loss and the eventual closure of all Canadian stores.
According to Atlassian, 40% of IT professionals report that incomplete documentation directly leads to project delays and system failures.
It’s easy to think that documentation can wait until later. But when something goes wrong, or a key person leaves, you’ll wish you had made it a priority.
03. The Challenges and Disadvantages of Documentation
While documentation is crucial, it’s not without its downsides. Like everything in software development, there’s a balance to be struck, and I’ve faced my fair share of challenges when it comes to keeping documentation useful and relevant.
3.1 Time-Consuming to Maintain
One of the biggest challenges I’ve encountered is the amount of time it takes to maintain documentation. It’s easy to fall into the trap of letting documentation fall behind as the codebase evolves. And if it’s not regularly updated, it quickly becomes obsolete. That’s why we’ve integrated documentation updates into our workflow to ensure it stays relevant.
3.2 Risk of Over-Reliance
Another issue is that teams can become too reliant on documentation, sometimes at the expense of writing clean, self-explanatory code. Documentation should complement the code, not replace it. In my view, clear and readable code is just as important, if not more so, than the documentation itself. Documentation serves as a guide for understanding higher-level concepts, but your code should still be maintainable and understandable on its own.
3.3 Potential for Information Overload
Sometimes, documentation can be too detailed, leading to information overload. This makes it harder for developers to find what they actually need. A balance has to be struck between providing essential information and overwhelming the reader with unnecessary details.
04. My Approach to Documentation: Simple but detail, Clear, and Automated
Over the years, I’ve developed a few key principles for making documentation work efficiently. Here’s what I’ve found works best:
4.1 Automated Documentation
In our projects, we’ve started using tools like Swagger to automatically generate documentation for our APIs. This saves us time and ensures that every time there’s a change, the documentation stays up-to-date. In large projects, where APIs are constantly evolving, this automation is a lifesaver.
4.2 Keep it Simple
When it comes to documentation, I’ve learned that simplicity is key. The best documentation is clear, concise, and easy to understand. We focus on making our documentation straightforward, using diagrams and clear language to explain complex systems without overwhelming the reader.
4.3 Embed Documentation into the Workflow
One of the smartest things we’ve done is embedding documentation into our CI/CD pipelines. Every time we push new code, we make sure that the corresponding documentation is also updated. If a developer pushes code without updating the related documentation, the build fails. This way, we never end up with outdated or missing documentation, which has saved us from a lot of headaches.
05. Final Thoughts: Documentation is a Lifeline
If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that documentation is critical for the long-term success of any e-commerce platform. It ensures that your team can scale, new developers can get up to speed quickly, and most importantly, that your platform can continue to grow without stumbling over preventable issues.
Whether you’re a developer, project manager, or business leader, I can’t stress enough how much documentation can save you time, money, and frustration in the long run. From my personal experience, whether I’m facing a technical challenge or working to ensure high-quality results, documentation is the unsung hero that keeps everything running smoothly.
