How do you document your design work? Hi,
Thank you for the initiative here: in my university we did not hear a single word how to properly document during the development process, but I think this is very important for all engineers.
it really extremely depends the type of documentation. I am working for an international company with big team size and working across timezones.
To document development process, we heavily depend on note-taking applications where you can enter formatted text, tables, figures, equations. input normally comes from many different sources, like simulation results, measurement results. You can easily document meeting minutes and timelines a hypothesis for something, give, Action Items, etc etc.
The notes are stored on the cloud and accessed anywhere, from laptop, tablet, smartphone.
Examples are Quip, Evernote, OneNote, and there are many other tools out there.
If the document is more result-oriented than process oriented, we heavily powerpoint or keynote. These tools are also great to document figures, easily draw and add text and equations. As the results in many cases are anyway discussed with other colleagues in a web-conference, this is already a good preparation for the discussion and the upcoming meeting. The slides help the author focus on one key point per slide. And as we know, figures often are more descriptive than plain text, anyway.
I was holding a university course in the past, where the students had to design some RF circuits. They where asked to document their design from the beginning with OpenOffice Impress, as they had to present the final result and final circuit to the group.