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Ask HN: Are real world software engineering/design docs available for study

3 points by billfruit ↗ HN
Are there any real world software engineering/design/requirements documents available. Most text books on the topic make use of fictional/toy documents which are not very helpful in converting which details are important to include and which are not.

More over good exemplary documents are valuable guides in how to go about creating such documents.

Certainly good documents have been produced in the last 50-60 years. Are they all lost to history?

3 comments

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DamonHD
Some open source projects will have at least some such docs available. Ours (OpenTRV) does.
billfruit
What about commerical projects which have been open sourced?

I wonder why such a scarcity of documents?

I think the lack of such documents hits teaching and learning of software engineering very badly.

DamonHD
Almost no software projects are documented as well as they reasonably could be because on the whole programmers don't like writing stuff up, sadly. Also the projects may not be systematically documented in places where you might easily find that documentation. External documentation includes patents and talks and workshops and conferences.