I'm not talking about User documentation or Help - I'm talking about all the supporting artifacts that get created during a project lifecycle.
This is a seemingly innocuous question but is usually a good gauge at how productive your project really is.
How much of the supporting documentation for your project is actually consumed?
How much of it is produced to satisfy your development process?
How much of it is to keep external stakeholders happy?
How much is created for reporting or metrics?
Who is actually consuming it?
It's easy to get caught up doing "Busy Work".
My guidelines are:
1. Do enough so that you have control over the project
2. Do enough so that your boss trusts that you have control over the project.
That's it.
If you don't need it to actually keep on top of things - don't waste time producing it. Because then you have to maintain it, and next thing you know you're spending all your time editing docs instead of producing value.
If you don't keep your boss happy and up to date, they're going to come and poke around and probably distract the teams doing the work. So work out what they need and how often they need to see it. From experience, It's rare that a weekly report and an invitation to product demo's won't cover their needs.
