Bit Rot in the Documentation
How to identify, fix, and prevent document decay.
The very mention of bit rot will strike terror into an engineer’s heart. Unused programs or features will often stop working after sufficient time has passed, even if ‘nothing has changed’. (From the hacker’s Jargon File.) Bit rot affects documentation too. Whether the cause be a changing environment, human error, or the infamous cosmic rays, we need to root out that rot.
But who has time to read and test the documentation on a regular basis? That’s the least efficient and most error-prone way of detecting doc decay.
Join me to explore the ways in which documentation can degenerate over time. We’ll look at innovative techniques for finding and fixing errors. Together we will ward off those cosmic rays!
