Documentationdriven

Documentation-driven development, sometimes written as documentationdriven, is a software engineering approach in which documentation—such as requirements, designs, interfaces, and acceptance criteria—plays a central role in guiding implementation. The idea is to produce a coherent, testable body of documentation that can serve as the primary reference for developers, testers, and stakeholders, and to align the project around clearly defined artifacts.

In practice, teams create artifacts that describe system goals, data models, API contracts, architectural decisions, state machines, and test cases. These documents are intended to be maintained alongside the codebase, providing a single source of truth that supports traceability from requirements to delivery and enables consistent communication across disciplines.

Documentation-driven development is distinct from, but related to, other practices such as design-first or API-first design, and it may intersect with contract-based design and model-driven engineering. It is not the same as test-driven development, which concentrates on tests to drive coding; however, documentation can define the tests that later validate the implementation.

Benefits typically cited include improved requirement clarity, better change management, easier onboarding, and stronger maintainability. Potential drawbacks include added overhead, the risk of documentation becoming outdated, and possible delays if initial documents are overly rigid or misaligned with evolving code.

The approach is often used in safety-critical or regulated domains, in API design processes, and in teams prioritizing long-term interoperability and governance. When applied effectively, documentation-driven development treats living documentation as a core project asset rather than a peripheral artifact.