Technical documentation

In engineering, technical documentation refers to any type of documentation that describes handling, functionality and architecture of a technical product or a product under development.

During development, a multitude of document types will play a significant role:

• system requirements
• system design
• system architecture

and various intermediate or intervening documents thereof.

The intended recipient for product technical documentation is both the (proficient) end user as well as the administrator / service or maintenance technician. In contrast to a mere "cookbook" manual, technical documentation aims at providing enough information for a user to understand inner and outer dependencies of the product at hand. The technical writer's task is to translate the usually highly formalized technical documentation produced during the development phase into more readable prose.