#3 is being crowd sourced already for many for profit companies and open source projects via wikis, blogs, forums, videos, podcasts, and Q&A sites populated primarily by volunteers. Particularly with games, documentation is sometimes intentionally not included to allow "explorer" players debate, theorycraft, and publish knowledge about the game for fun, notoriety, and sometimes profit.
We've also seen further pushes to higher level languages, automated testing, improved version control systems, better and more accessible bug and feature tracking products that begin to take the place of official documentation or at least let it be automatically generated.
I also don't think we've reached the end of innovation in this area of self documenting code plus incentivized crowdsourced documentation. Slow incremental changes are eventually going to make that current help link at the top of your software app extinct, or at least look like a dinosaur compared to the elegant evolution that takes its place.
I'm with you on self-documenting code, but what about user documentation, and documentation of APIs?
Now I'm not saying the current model in for-fee software is right. I just wonder, "If it's this hard when you're paying people to do it, how about when you're not?"
I hope to be proven wrong! :-) My company has a great tech write, but I live in fear of the day when someone buys one of his screenplays and he doesn't need us anymore...
Aren't there companies like mashape for documentation of APIs (or at least through their software/proxy)? And if you decide to charge for it, ~20% goes to them. Works for me, but I don't know if that is the cool thing to do…
We've also seen further pushes to higher level languages, automated testing, improved version control systems, better and more accessible bug and feature tracking products that begin to take the place of official documentation or at least let it be automatically generated.
I also don't think we've reached the end of innovation in this area of self documenting code plus incentivized crowdsourced documentation. Slow incremental changes are eventually going to make that current help link at the top of your software app extinct, or at least look like a dinosaur compared to the elegant evolution that takes its place.