System Software TOC

As a continuation of my last post on software project perspectives, I wanted to bring up an old classic. How to structure documentation or reference/wiki ages for a very large software project?

Here I've often drawn inspiration from the old Microsoft Development Network (MSDN) table of contents for Windows / Win32. This API set has been around for decades and has been reorganized and presented in various ways, but one of the ones I have found the most useful is still accessible through the Wayback Machine.

Here it is, with some extra explanations on my part on what you might include in them for a more general system.

• Administration and Management.
• Component Development.
• Data Access.
• Development Guide.
• Driver Development Kit.
• Graphics and Multimedia.
• Messaging and Collaboration.
• Networking.
• Security.
• System Services.
• Tools.
• User Interface.
• Windows Versions.
• XML. This is probably the most odd-one out of the bunch. Eventually this moved under Data Access if I'm not misremembering, but it was popular enough that they put it up there I suppose.

I hope this is good inspiration for the next time you need some top-level topics for your large system.

Happy doc writing!

Tags:  management

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