# How we are driving up the quality of internal technical documentation at Volvo Cars

DevFeed: [How we are driving up the quality of internal technical documentation at Volvo Cars](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/how-we-are-driving-up-the-quality-of-internal-technical-documentation-at-volvo-cars-28869.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://medium.com/volvo-cars-engineering/how-we-are-driving-up-the-quality-of-internal-technical-documentation-at-volvo-cars-with-two-efae4056172c?source=rss----4eed8113139---4>)

Author: Gary Niemen

Published: 2024-02-26T11:39:27Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Volvo Cars Engineering - Medium](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/volvo-cars-engineering-medium.md>)

Topics: [Documentation](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/documentation.md>), [Developer experience](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/developer-experience.md>), [engineering-culture](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/engineering-culture.md>)

Tags: [backstage](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/backstage.md>), [blog-post](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/blog-post.md>), [developer-experience](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/developer-experience.md>), [docs-as-code](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/docs-as-code.md>), [documentation](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/documentation.md>), [engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/engineering.md>), [platform-engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/platform-engineering.md>), [technical-documentation](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/technical-documentation.md>), [technical-writing](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/technical-writing.md>), [writing](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/writing.md>)

## AI overview

The article describes how a small technical-writing team at Volvo Cars is improving the quality of internal technical documentation for more than 4,500 software engineers. It presents treating documentation like code as one part of a broader approach to scaling technical writing.

## Source excerpt

How we are driving up the quality of internal technical documentation at Volvo Cars -- with just a few technical writersTreating docs like code is part of it -- but not all of itGenerated by Deep Dream Generator by Author There are many components to a great developer experience. One of them, I think we can all agree, is to have quality internal technical documentation. But how to get to that place? Few engineering organisations prioritise recruiting technical writers above software engineers. And software engineers, typically, and perfectly understandably, prefer to be coding rather than writing. The answer in the tech industry of today -- is to find a way to scale tech writing. Consider this... Many years ago, when I was working as a technical writer at one of the world's leading IT companies, the sacred ratio was one tech writer for 8-10 developers. Later, when I moved on and started working as a documentation lead in FinTech, I tried to get the company to implement this ratio -- but, alas, it was never going to fly. We settled on about 1 to 30. I was not too pleased. If only I had known what was to come. When I started working in big tech, it was more like 1 to 1000. And now at Volvo Cars, it is -- well that's what this blog post is all about. How just a few technical writers (two within a centralised developer experience function and one focusing on a specific part of the organisation) are driving up the quality of internal technical documentation among 4500+ software engineers at Volvo Cars. (What's the ratio now, huh?) As we'll describe in this blog post, moving to treating docs like code is one key component of scaling technical writing, but not the only one. Implement docs like code About five years ago when at a previous company, I stumbled across Google technical writing manager, Riona MacNamara's talk from the 2015 Write the Docs conference, Documentation, Disrupted: How Two Technical Writers Changed Google Engineering Culture. Riona was talking about solving p