Knowledge Maintenance

Patterns to maintain knowledge.

Patterns of this Type

Name Short Description
Defer a decision to the last responsible moment is also a risk-reducing technique for writing documentation.
Documents should not reference details in other documents that may change without notice.
Do not render text to the reader that has no information value.
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.
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.
A document should focus to answer one question. This way documents can be more easily reused and combined.
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.
A document should only reference documents that are not less stable than itself.
Assume that an information is not needed to be written down unless proven otherwise.