Template for Knowledge Transfer

Question

I have been working for more than a year for this company.

Now they want me to create a KT Document for reference.

Is there any template available for me to document the coding done by me..

Answer 1

I don't believe there is a helpful general template, all templates probably will be to large and restrictive to be helpfull to you. What you need to write down depends on to many factors:

• What is your role
• The size of the software
• The complexity of the software
• intended audience
• what is already done by other roles

What you could do in my mind is make a check-list and per project see what is covered in the code it self, or in the documentation of others, select the things you need to cover, report the things that aren't covered anywhere back to your manager.

Making the code self-explanatory and putting comments in the code should make sure that you don't have to document a lot about the lowest code level.

I think the people here at programmers could help a lot with a check-list, but to get you started. (Remember this list is supposed to be filtered and hopefully a lot will be covered by other roles like operational managers, software architects, functional designers)

• purpose of the document
• intended audience (maybe it will not only be fellow devs put also people from application management)
• Functionality the software enables
• How to get a new developer started
• design decisions (a nice level of decisions and a check-list for this can be found at P&P)
• general overview of components and their dependencies
• Technical debt
• security
• third party tooling used
• Deployment strategies
• Databases structure
• stakeholders concerns and how the software full-fills these concerns.
• What system quality attributes have identified and addressed how ?
• The purpose of machine depended configuration settings
• how the install the software
• how to roll the software back

When you look at the list above that is created without knowledge of your situation you can imagine the size of general purpose templates.

One of the most important things I think is that the documentation must have a purpose, if you document purely for the purpose of documenting that is a waste of your time. Sometimes a company just wants the documentation for certain levels of compliance.