Writing developer documentation and keeping it up to date is a struggle for most tech organizations. Having proper documentation management paired with source control and ticketing systems goes a long way to improve efficiency in your team. In this article, we will look at using Confluence, Jira, and Bitbucket to follow best practices in writing developer documentation.
Confluence, Jira, and Bitbucket are Atlassian products so they are made to work together. Confluence is a document management system and Jira is a ticketing system to help you keep track of day-to-day tasks. Bitbucket is a Git code management system with excellent features for collaboration, testing, deploying, and managing projects. When you combine Confluence, Jira, and Bitbucket, you can effectively manage your documentation using best practices for information management. Let’s take a look at how you can apply these tools to manage your developer documentation.
Writing Developer Documentation for Your Local Development Environment
You can use Jira to manage developer tasks and keep track of them using their robust agile tools such as a kanban board. Then, you can create pages in Confluence and directly link anything in Jira from search filters to individual tickets. And finally, you can use Bitbucket to link code branches or commits directly to your documentation and ticketing systems. This is a very effective way to manage developer documentation.
For example, you could have a page in Confluence detailing the local developer installation instructions and then link to any known issues you are working on in Jira. You can even incorporate links to code from Bitbucket to add detail on custom configurations for a local development environment such as config files.
Connecting Jira and Bitbucket
To set up a connection between your Bitbucket repository and Jira, click the Jira Issues tab. Here, you will see instructions on linking your project by including the issue key from Jira or you can manually link Jira projects. This approach will help your developers when they run into issues and make their setup process more efficient.
Writing Developer Documentation for Releases
I really like managing my releases using Jira. This feature allows me to differentiate the code that will be included in each release or deploy. Each ticket in Jira can link to specific commits in Bitbucket for easy access to code for review. You can create release documentation in Confluence by adding macros for Jira change logs and even a status report. This is an excellent way to collaborate on releases to ensure that they go as smoothly as possible.
New Pluralsight Course – Effective Content and Team Information Management – Help Your Team Reduce Search Time
You can learn more about Confluence in my latest Pluralsight course, Effective Content and Team Information Management – Help Your Team Reduce Search Time. In this course you will learn information management best practices and compare and contrast the most popular documentation and file sharing tools including SharePoint, Microsoft Office 365, OneDrive, Google Drive, GitHub Wiki, Basecamp, Confluence, Box, and Dropbox.
By the end of this course, you will be able to choose the right content and information management tooling for your team and your types of documentation. Click the link below to get started today!
