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- Less Dependence on Individuals. A project (or parts of a project) might rely too heavily on the technical knowledge of an individual, which can result on the downfall of a project once the individual graduates. Documentation ensures the knowledge is spread across the team and for future members, and is not lost throughout the years.
- A Central Source of Truth. Ensures everyone has a clear understanding of the projects goals, design, and implementations.
- Learning and Onboarding. Members undertaking new projects, or being introduced to SIPB, can refer to documentations to get up-to-speed on what we have been doing. There's less wasted time having to explaining everything from scratch, and – more importantly – new members gain important context that enables them to ask better, more informed questions.
- Support Maintenance. A big difference with projects you might do on a semester in 6.101/6.102/etc and projects you do in SIPB or industry, is that you now need to care more about how the project does in the long-run. A SIPB project lasts for years or decades, and hence documentation is important to keep the project evolving as times change.
- Enhance collaboration, encourage best practices, improve usability, save time, ...
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