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by afterburner5 1261 days ago
So, if you're using Jira, Confluence is the obvious choice. However, I for one think it suffers from a big issue, i.e. discoverability.

Because there's no tree-like hierarchy, it's quite difficult surfacing information unless you know exactly what you're looking for. And while some people will know what they want, I find it beneficial to make everything as visible as possible, since more eyes means it's less likely for documentation to go stale.

At work, we've currently trialled a multi doc site using MKDocs, with different topics, published into GCS buckets, and sourced from a git repo. mdbook and gitbook offer similar strategies.

Discourse is similar to stackoverflow, and has the advantage of people being able to ask questions, but it's not the best medium for documentation.

I think something light like mdbook might be the right choice to start with, it wouldn't tie you into any particular solution, as your documentation would live in markdown, but would be consumed from a nicer, more polished UI.

This, of course, assumes you're all familiar and comfortable with markdown, but I think the best solution is to try different tools, so the more portable your actual docs are, the better.

Notion is also a very good candidate, and IMO, a better choice than Confluence, but similarly, discoverability isn't great

1 comments

Valid considerations & so far I definitely agree Confluence struggles with discoverability. We've started using Confluence & hope to make sure we properly utilize "labels" to help mitigate the discoverability shortcomings. Another shortcoming we found for Confluence was the lack of Q&A options (we wanted support for something similar to an internal stack-overflow). So far we've mitigated that issue by leveraging a Q&A Confluence template from this video: https://youtu.be/IkRmyUCnRDo?t=144

Leveraging markdown to enable service agnostic documentation sounds really interesting...