Event Documentation

Event documentation is writing down what each event is, when it fires, which properties it carries and what each value means — the team's shared memory about the data.

Event documentation is the least glamorous yet highest-yield data-governance task, because without it the knowledge of the data lives in a few people's heads and leaves when they do. Good documentation lets a new analyst learn, without asking a developer, whether purchase fires before or after payment confirmation — and that single ambiguity can be the difference between a correct number and a misleading one. Documentation is part of a larger idea called the tracking plan. The common trap is that documentation is written once and then abandoned; documentation that falls out of step with the code is worse than none, because it gives false assurance. So documentation must be kept beside the event itself and up to date, not in a file no one visits.