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by phixiuz 2213 days ago
> There are plenty of things that happen on any company that have no relation to the code

Some more details about our approach that addresses your concerns: (1) for content changes unrelated to code, anyone (tech or non-tech) is able to open a new MR, and after approval it automatically gets merged into our reference branch and deployed (2) for content changes related to new (unreleased) code, the input from non-tech people (e.g. customer support) is usually requested via an already existing merge request (via a mention), they can then add their input/content via gitlab's interface straight into the markdown files (and see a live preview), this way we ensure this sort of content goes live along with the code and requires no extra coordination

> I am not telling you that what you are doing is wrong, but scalable it is not.

I hope with my clarification above it makes more sense.

> when you say "our use case": are you speaking on behalf on the whole company or just the tech team?

On behalf of the whole company: we have a single product/platform that is continuously increasing in complexity, and it really helps to have a single process in order to maintain a knowledge base that covers as many aspects as possible (tech and non-tech). We believe this approach will also minimize replication of content across departments (facilitates cross-linking), and we're intending to also create an aggregated search (next to the individual search) across all categories of our knowledge base (product/engineering/support/sales/..), in order to more easily retrieve relevant content.

> Beware the usage of the Royal We when you say "our use case"

I am not implying this is set in stone, we (as a whole team) thought long about this flow, and for now it seems to work great, and I hope (responsible for maintaining this technically) that it scales up to some point far enough in the future. I'd say we were mostly inspired by Gitlab, they seem to adopt a similar approach, and that seems to be scaling quite okay over there :). We've noticed ourselves that the general "documentation mindset" has definitely grown among the team because of this specific process and the ease of adding content, updating content and retrieving content.

1 comments

So essentially you are saying that the tech side still works as gatekeepers of the documentation - need to approve MR's, requesting input via mentions - which is fine until the organization is skewed to the tech side.

As for Gitlab, their work processes are interesting, but I assume that most of the non-technical work there goes to issue tracker and the wiki? I am failing to see where there a strong connection to the code repository is required there.

Afaik, Gitlab's wiki/knowledge base is also a separate repository and content is added/updated via regular MR flow. Our knowledge base is still part of the main codebase due to practical reasons (CI/CD related), but we'll eventually also migrate this to a separate repository as well, to avoid the unintentional gatekeeper aspect as you mention ;).