Cyrille Martraire - Living Documentation: Continuous Knowledge Sharing by Design

First, Id like to give special thanks my official reviewers, Rebecca Wirfs-Brock, Steve Hayes, and Woody Zuill, for the insightful review of the manuscript in a very short period of time, which really helped improve and organize the material better.

Many thanks to the Pearson team, starting with Chris Zahn, the developmental editor Ive been lucky to work with regularly, Mark Taub, publisher, who led the whole publishing process, Kitty Wilson for the meticulous copy editing, and Tonya Simpson, it was a pleasure working with you throughout the project. I also want to thank Chris Guzikowski, executive editor, for signing the book at Pearson back in 2016.

The ideas in this book originate from people I respect a lot. Dan North, Chris Matts, and Liz Keogh derived the practice called behavioral driven development (BDD), which is one of the best examples of living documentation at work. Eric Evans, in his book Domain-Driven Design, proposed many ideas that, in turn, inspired BDD. Gojko Adzic proposed the term living documentation in his book Specification by Example. In this book, I elaborate on these ideas and generalizes them to other areas of a software project. DDD has emphasized how the thinking evolves during the life of a project, and its proponents have proposed unifying the domain model and code. Similarly, this book suggests unifying project artifacts and documentation.

The patterns movement and its authors, starting with Ward Cunningham and Kent Beck, have made it increasingly obvious that it is possible to do better documentation by referring to patterns, those already published or presented at Pattern Languages of Programs (PLoP) conferences.

Pragmatic Programmers, Martin Fowler, Ade Oshyneye, Andreas Rping, Simon Brown, and many other authors have distilled nuggets of wisdom on how to do better documentation, in a better way. Rinat Abdulin first wrote on living diagrams and, indeed, coined the term. Thanks to you all of you!

Eric Evans, thanks for all the discussions, usually not on this book, and for your advice.

I would also like to thank Brian Marick for sharing his own work on visible workings with me. As encouragement matters, discussions with Vaughn Vernon and Sandro Mancuso on writing a book did help me, so thanks, guys!

Some discussions are more important than others; especially important are those that generate new ideas, lead to better understanding, or are just exciting. Thanks to George Dinwiddie, Paul Rayner, Jeremie Chassaing, Arnauld Loyer, and Romeu Moura for all the exciting discussions and for sharing your own stories and experiments.

Through the writing of this book, I looked for ideas and feedback as much as I could, particularly during open-space sessions at software development conferences. Maxime Sanglan gave me the first encouraging feedback, along with Franziska Sauerwein. Thanks, Franzi and Max! I want to thank all the participants of the sessions I have run on living documentation at these conferences and unconferences, such as in Agile France, Socrates Germany, Socrates France, Codefreeze Finland, and the Meetup Software Craftsmanship Paris round tables and several Jams of Code at Arolla in the evening.

I had been giving talks at conferences for some time but always concerning practices that are already widely accepted in our industry. With more novel content like living documentation, I also had to test acceptance from various audiences, and I thank the first conferences that took the risk of select the topic: NCrafts in Paris, Domain-Driven Design eXchange in London, Bdx.io in Bordeaux, and ITAKE Bucharest. Thanks for hosting the first versions of the talk or workshop. It was very helpful to have great feedback to inspire more effort to create the book.