Developer Docs Planning

Use this skill to decide what developer documentation to create before drafting. It maps user needs to content types, scope, outline, ownership, release context, research work, and decision records.

This skill is derived from Docs for Developers: An Engineer's Field Guide to Technical Writing, especially Chapter 2, "Planning your documentation." It is expanded with paraphrased guidance from Christopher Gales and the Splunk Documentation Team's The Product Is Docs: Writing Technical Documentation in a Product Development Group, especially Chapter 2, "Agile," Chapter 6, "Documentation Decisions," Chapter 13, "Research for Technical Writers," Chapter 14, "Scenario-driven Information Development," and Chapter 22, "Working with Product Management." Do not copy book prose into user outputs. Source: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-7217-6

Quick Start

1. Load guidelines.md to choose the smallest useful reference set.
2. Confirm user goal, audience, product surface, and release context.
3. Choose content types by user task, not by internal org structure.
4. Use workflows/create-doc-plan.md for a full plan.
5. Use the specialized workflows when the task is a decision, research pass, scenario plan, or Agile integration.
6. Output an outline with doc type, purpose, owner, source of truth, dependencies, and validation.

Default Output

When planning documentation, return: