Problem: Developers helping build IBM Transformation Advisor, a software platform for migrating applications from local servers to cloud domains, needed to write migration rules for specific domains. These rules helped determine the migration path and experience of the application and the user migrating their application.

Impact: Creating writing guidelines for these migration rules allowed developers creating these rules to draft standardized, clear, and legible documentation for a highly technical and complex process.

Insights:

• These users that these rules were written for were mostly software architects, and this platform was being mostly used internally at IBM
• A lot of this language was written for developers who were already highly fluent in the domain, and skillsets.

Action:

• The focus of these guidelines was not to educate on the domain, but to create consistency developers onboarding to Transformation Advisor and drafting these migration rules.
• Creating a consistent style guide, or the beginning of one, was important so that these migration rules were digestible and clear.