Documentation Quality Metrics

Use this skill to evaluate developer documentation quality and choose metrics that answer real questions. It combines editorial quality with analytics and user outcomes.

This skill is derived from Docs for Developers: An Engineer's Field Guide to Technical Writing, especially Chapter 9, "Measuring documentation quality." 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 11, "Measuring Success." 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. Identify the decision the measurement should support.
3. Decide how much uncertainty the team needs to reduce before acting.
4. Audit functional quality before structural polish.
5. Use workflows/audit-doc-quality.md for a full quality or metric plan.
6. Prefer metric clusters with baseline and context over isolated numbers.

Default Output

When auditing quality or designing metrics, return: