As a software developer, your primary focus may be on writing code, but that’s far from the only kind of writing you’ll encounter in the field software development. The importance of clear and effective communication within development teams, with clients, and across various stakeholders cannot be overstated. In this article, we’ll take a look at the diverse range of writing tasks that software developers often find themselves engaged in alongside their coding duties.
However, it’s worth noting that this exploration is grounded in my personal experiences, offering insights into the various writing tasks that have become common in my daily work routine. It is still important to me that it can be different for every software developer. It always depends on the project, the company and the team, how many and which tasks you have to take over as a developer.
Table of Contents
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Readme’s
A “Readme” in a software project is a text file or documentation placed in the project’s main directory, providing essential information such as project description, installation instructions, and usage guidelines to help developers understand and work with the project effectively. It serves as a crucial reference point for project orientation and collaboration.
Tasks / User Storys
As a developer, you need tasks to work on. Therefore you have to sit down with the team and define the tasks. This usually happens in a backlog refinement. Tasks or user stories are created. In these, a specific task is clearly defined together with the team and formulated in a way that makes it clear to everyone what needs to be done.
E-Mails
Although I communicate less via e-mail than I thought I would, a lot of things still happen via e-mail. Creating and managing appointments, official e-mails within the company and especially with customers. Additional information may be provided after appointments and reports send out to other people. All questions (outside of the own team) that do not have to be clarified in a meeting can be answered by mail.
Wiki pages / Informative content
Project-related informational content for the team, in my case mainly referring to Confluence pages associated with the project. I categorize most of it as collaborative documentation, which is not technical documentation or Readmes. It includes various forms of collaborative texts, including information for colleagues, meeting logs but also all kinds of other things that should be available for everyone in the team.
Technical documentation
You have to write technical documentation from time to time. This means larger documents that describe an application or individual application parts on a tech, this can also include different kinds of diagrams. In my projects this has always been a minor task, but I had to work even more on readme’s and other informational texts.
Chat messages
Most of the communication in the team takes place either directly in the office or in video calls. However, a lot is also discussed via chat messages. This includes everything within the team, within our own company, but also in relation to the customer. For example, we work with developers and other employees of the customer and sometimes information is exchanged via chat messages in applications like Mattermost or Teams.
Presentations / Reports
For some meetings it is useful to prepare a presentation and it is necessary to write text for them as well. For the sprint review we prepare a presentation every three weeks to present our work to the customer. But also in other calls you can write down information in a presentation and present it at the beginning.