UPDATE: I've gotten a lot of feedback, but no info on what percent of time people spend on docs. To keep it simple, say the docs are for developers and peer reviewed; meaning the peer understands how to do it, and the comments are more for the what is being done, not how to do it from scratch; which in my case is the request, just don't think the request is common.
Been working a project for 2 months, and it's done. When the project started, documentation was not a requirement; focus was "get it done." So, all the sudden there's an interest in creating documentation for the project… that's 100% turn-key, meaning that someone with no understanding of anything, would be able to do everything required to duplicate the work done.
In case it matters, the project was a data profiling, extraction, transformation, and loading themed. Meaning I was given sets of data, a final state of the data — and figured out all the issues/solutions to make that happen.
Just wondering if anyone has seen stats on the average percentage of time take to write docs.
(Have questions/feedback, just comment — thanks.)
Best Answer
Do they actually want developer or user documentation? To me it sounds like the former, but it is quite unclear.
I would say this is a completely unrealistic expectation. Of course depending on what "no understanding of anything" actually means: a person with no programming background? or one not experienced in the specific language / platform / domain? Or ... ?
Anyway, writing such detailed documentation is a huge task, much better suited for a professional document writer than a (however experienced) developer. And its result would quickly get obsolete - the more detailed the docs, the faster it gets out of sync with the code.