Documentation in Open-Source Organizations: Content Audit and Gap Analysis for Perl

Perl – an open-source, general-purpose programming language – has a lot of documentation, organized in the form of articles, tutorials, FAQs, and policy documents. Such detailed documentation, if not organized well, is overwhelming and frustrating for the audience. With over 100 core documentation pages, the users can easily get lost in the volume of the information, resulting in a bad user experience. This project aimed at resolving these issues and improving the structure of Perl’s core documentation. The project started with a comprehensive content audit, followed by a gap analysis and an understanding of the existing information architecture. Toward the end, a plan for the future of Perl’s documentation was drafted to help improve the knowledge base. The findings of this project highlight that good documentation and user research are imperative for the success of an engineering tool like a programming language. This paper presents the example of a structured process that documentation teams can follow in engineering communication.