What Is Continuous Documentation?

Continuous Documentation is the guiding philosophy behind all of the components that make up Swimm. In the modern age, for documentation to remain relevant, it must integrate continuously with the code that it supports. For Swimm to enable this, it needs to understand when the documentation you've written is out-of-date.

When is documentation considered continuous?

We Consider Documentation Continuous If It Meets The Following Criteria:

Code-coupled

This means documentation that explicitly references parts of the code.

For example, including code snippets, names of functions or variables, file paths and other explicit reference to the code, within the documents.

Up-to-date

Continuously verifying documentation means making sure that the current state of the documentation matches the current state of the codebase, as the code evolves.

Written When Best

Continuously creating documentation means that documentation is written not as an aftermath, but when it makes sense.

The best way to achieve this is by running Swimm's verification checks within your existing continuous integration workflow, or building a continuous integration workflow with Swimm if you don't currently use a CI server. If you can't adopt a CI server, it can be accomplished through commit hooks.

Further reading on continuous documentation

Omer Rosenbaum, our CTO & Swimm Co-founder has written the first blog post of a two-part series that dives deeper into the rationale behind the Continuous Documentation manifesto.