Developer Docs Technical Research

Use this skill to investigate product behavior before planning or writing developer documentation. It turns specs, code, prototypes, tickets, SMEs, and hands-on tests into traceable research notes.

This skill is derived from paraphrased guidance in Christopher Gales and the Splunk Documentation Team's The Product Is Docs: Writing Technical Documentation in a Product Development Group, especially Chapter 13, "Research for Technical Writers," Chapter 16, "Technical Verification," Chapter 19, "Working with Engineers," 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. State the documentation question, audience, feature, release context, and risk.
3. Build a source map from code, product surfaces, specs, tickets, SMEs, QA, support, and existing docs.
4. Use workflows/research-feature-docs.md when feature behavior or user consequences are unclear.
5. Use workflows/interview-doc-sources.md when the main work is extracting facts from SMEs.
6. Return verified facts, assumptions, contradictions, source owners, and open questions.

Default Output

When completing a documentation research pass, return: