DevOps vs. DocOps

[Richard Gaunt]

Looking for advice & thoughts from the community please :)

DevOps manages code brilliantly through tools like Git and Bitbucket, but how can we replicate that functionality (incremental changes, branches, approvals, merge of branches into production) etc with Confluence. 

I'd like to govern Confluence based documentation as strongly as we can govern code through BitBucket.

Interested in anyone's thoughts in this matter! :)

[Kris Klima]

Hi @Richard Gaunt and welcome to the Community.

I'm one of the original crew of Tech Writers (information engineers) that pioneered DocOps over a decade ago at CA Technologies... using Confluence.

Basic principles:

• documentation is a part of the product
• documentation is incuded in the definition of Done - no feature is released without documentation
• documentation ticket for any feature lives on the same board as any engineering or QA ticket for that feature and is subject to all the processes
• writers are 'embedded' in the dev teams and participate in all agile rituals
• engineers and QA have access to Confluence and participate in drafting/review iterations

You integrate engineering and docs through processes and interactions. Having writers in daily standups, plannings, etc. elevates their role within the team as they can show their value every day, and raises awareness about documentation and docs processes among the engineering crowd. It really does work.

At the same time, you're not forcing writers to use git-based tools that were never designed to be used to write and manage actual human language text.

I have later adapted DocOps for use at Emplifi - which resulted in my team winning the Atlassian's Work Differently, Together award and a customer success story by Atlassian.

I've written extensively about using Confluence and marketplace apps for documentation management - for example, you can learn how to build a documentation solution on Confluence in 30 minutes :) 

Disclaimer: I now work for K15t, one of the Atlassian Marketplace apps' vendor. We're holding a webinar today about using Confluence for documentation on Sept 10.

[Thiago P _Atlassian Support_]

Hey there @Richard Gaunt ,

Very interesting topic, thank you for posting.

Managing documents with Confluence has a lot of similarities if compared to DevTools products, although features will not always be called the same thing or behave exactly the same.

Versioning - Confluence implements a Version History feature that allows us to review previous versions of pages and attachments, allowing them to be restored if needed.

Incremental changes - this is done with Collaborative Editing where a Draft can be viewed and edited by multiple people before a new page version is published.

Branches - specific parts of a main page can be controlled in child pages by using the Excerpt and Insert Excerpt macros.

Merge and Pull Requests - both Comments and Inline Comments will highlight specific parts of the page and suggest fixes, which can be Resolved once a page owner edits the page.

Curious to hear if there's any different opinions or maybe Marketplace Apps that expand on the core concepts!  =]