A fixed schedule, monthly reviews, quarterly audits, feels responsible but misses the actual driver of staleness: releases, not calendar time. An article can go stale the day after a monthly review if a relevant feature ships the next morning.
The better framing is event-driven, not time-driven.
Direct answer
Help docs should be updated every time a customer-facing change ships, not on a fixed calendar schedule. A monthly or quarterly review still leaves articles wrong for up to that entire window after a release. In practice, most teams do not hit anything close to this: in our audit, docs updates that did land took a median of 0.5 days and a mean of 3.5 days after the triggering change, with a p90 of 11 days for the slowest cases. Closing that delay means tying the update to the release itself, which is only realistic with some form of automatic detection.
Why calendar-based reviews fail
A quarterly review catches everything that changed in the last quarter, all at once, which means the average article was wrong for weeks before the review even ran. Reviews also compete with everything else on the calendar and are among the first things skipped when the quarter gets busy, which is often exactly when the most changes shipped.
What update speed actually looks like today
| Metric | Value from our audit |
|---|---|
| Median delay (release to docs update) | 0.5 days |
| Mean delay | 3.5 days |
| p75 delay | 3 days |
| p90 delay (slowest cases) | 11 days |
Even the median case is a real gap during which a customer could read an article describing the old behavior. See the full research for methodology.
What event-driven actually means
Event-driven means the trigger for a docs update is the release itself, a merged pull request, not a date on a calendar. That requires some way of detecting customer-facing changes as they ship, since manually watching every release for documentation impact is not realistic much past a two- or three-person team.
Frequently asked questions
Is a monthly documentation review good enough?
It is better than nothing, but it still leaves articles wrong for up to a month after any release. Event-driven updates, tied to the release itself, close that gap much further.
How fast should a docs update happen after a release?
As close to immediately as practical. Our audit found a median delay of 0.5 days even among updates that did happen, which is the benchmark worth beating, not matching.
Can a small team realistically update docs on every release?
Manually, rarely past a couple of people. With some form of automatic detection and drafting, it becomes realistic regardless of team size, since the detection step does not depend on anyone remembering.
Conclusion
- Docs should update with every customer-facing release, not on a fixed calendar.
- Most teams currently run a median delay of 0.5 days even when updates do happen.
- Event-driven updates require detecting changes as they ship, not reviewing after the fact.
- See how DocsKoala works, or check pricing to close the delay.