A document should focus to answer one question. This way documents can be more easily reused and combined.

Domain: Software Design
Type: Knowledge Maintenance
Values: Easy to maintain, Easy to find, Easy to understand, Easy to use

If a piece of documentation covers many aspects of a concept, the document is harder to reuse.

Therefore a topic-based approach where each document covers explicitly only one aspect of a concept is typically preferred. This way authors can combine these pieces of information more easily to create their documents.

Related Practices

The following practices are related to this principle.

Employ Mapping Documents: Mapping documents support adding information to the association of two (or more) documents.
Single Sourcing: Reduce redundancy by having one source of truth for each information. This way the written information is more easily reusable in other documents and - which is even more important - it is referenceable. Single sourcing demands automation.

Related Principles

The following principles are related to this principle.

DRY Principle: Redundant information is hard to maintain, keeping it in-sync. Therefore strive for reducing redundancy by defining one authoritative location for each piece of information.
KISS Principle: Keep your documentation simple. Assume that authors have relevant information for the project in their mind, but not necessarily the skills and resources to communicate it. Therefore make it very simply and joyful for them to share their expertise.
Law of Demeter: Documents should not reference details in other documents that may change without notice.
Open Closed Principle: Be open for extension, closed for modification.
Principle of least Astonishment: Documentation should appear to the reader as being written by one single person. Uniformity reduces the chance of astonishment. The principles applies to all areas of documentation, including style and organization.
Self Documentation Principle: There should either be no need for additional documentation for an artifact or that documentation should be as close as possible to the artifact. This make it more probable that the documentation changes with the artifact and therefore keeps up-to-date.
Separation of Concerns: Reduce the amount of documents with overlapping information. Also divide the concerns regarding the formatting and - as far as possible - the structure from the content. Whenever there are different aspects, consider if handling them independently would make things easier.
Stable Dependencies Principle: A document should only reference documents that are not less stable than itself.
YAGNI Principle: Assume that an information is not needed to be written down unless proven otherwise.

References

More information on this principle.

Single Responsibility Principle: The principle described as a pattern on wiki.c2.com.
Single responsibility principle: The principle described on Wikipedia.

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