README.md

Documentation maturity audit

A resource provided by your friends from Google Season of Docs, Google Open Source, and contributors.

The documentation content maturity checklist and documentation inventory guide help open source maintainers and contributors identify the documentation and docs process they already have and learn how to take it to the next level.

These materials are:

A tool to help you understand what you’ve already achieved with your documentation and to celebrate your successes, no matter how early.
A tool to help you contextualize your open source project’s documentation content and processes.
A tool to help you create your own documentation roadmap.

These materials are not:

A to-do list. Your project might not need everything here depending on the project’s overall level of maturity, software complexity, and the resources available to you and your collaborators.
A standard against which to judge other projects or teams. Use these tools introspectively; from the outside, you may not be able to determine whether a project has satisfied a point on the checklist, even if it has.

You’re free to copy, modify, and redistribute these materials under the terms of the CC-BY license. See the LICENSE file for details.

Before you begin, collect any resources related to learning about your project, such as links to:

Then follow these steps:

Create an inventory of your documentation content by following the documentation inventory guide.
Compare your project to the documentation content maturity checklist.

Although the documentation inventory guide and documentation content maturity checklist are complementary tools that work best together, each stands alone. If you have relatively little content to audit or you want to complete a limited, preliminary audit faster, then start with the documentation content maturity checklist.

To learn how to contribute to this project, read CONTRIBUTING.md.

Want to get help with improving your documentation? Check out these resources: