Dwarf galaxies may play a key role in the formation and evolution of bigger systems. This makes it a topic of major interest to know how they form and evolve and, in particular, how their star formation histories (SFHs) have proceeded since their birth. For nearby galaxies, thecolour–magnitude diagram (CMD) contains stars formed over their full lifetime. It is hence a fossil record of their SFHs. Analysis via synthetic CMDs provides a powerful tool to retrieve them. In this paper, I briefly present the critical issues related to synthetic CMD analysis and make a summary of the currently available results for the SFH extending over the full lifetimes of galaxies.