How Do You Manage Documentation Without Slowing Down Your Agile Team?

[#1]

Hey Atlassian Community

If you've worked in an Agile environment, you know how important it is to keep the momentum going. But documentation often feels like a speed bump, slowing down releases and creating misalignment across teams.

According to the Agile Manifesto, while "working software over comprehensive documentation" is ideal, some documentation is still necessary to keep teams aligned and stakeholders informed.

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Common Documentation Challenges

• Time-consuming manual work that pulls developers, product managers, and support teams away from their core tasks
• Misalignment when stakeholders don’t receive timely and accurate information
• Reactive approach to documentation leading to missed updates and last-minute scrambles
• Developer productivity drops as engineers shift focus from coding to documentation
• Operational inefficiency with teams switching between tools and manually compiling information

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Can You Relate to These Scenarios?

• A Product Manager rushing to create release notes before a launch but struggling to align with sales and support teams
• A Support Lead needing updated help articles but missing critical information because documentation lags behind releases
• A Developer having to pause development to manually write technical documentation instead of focusing on building new features

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A Different Approach: FastDoc in Action

We built FastDoc, a Jira-native app, to simplify the entire documentation workflow—from a task being marked as Done in Jira to publishing a polished document in Confluence in just minutes

Here's how it works

1. Task Completion: When an Epic or task is marked as Done, FastDoc automatically prompts a reminder to generate relevant documentation

2. First Draft Generation: With a click, FastDoc uses contextual AI to create release notes, help articles, or marketing content directly from Jira tickets

3. One-Click Publishing: The draft can be reviewed and then published to Confluence, keeping all teams aligned with consistent and up-to-date information

In just a few minutes, what usually takes hours of manual effort is completed, helping Agile teams maintain momentum, avoid bottlenecks, and ensure stakeholder alignment

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If this sounds like a challenge you’re facing, you might find FastDoc helpful. You can check it out on the Atlassian Marketplace: FastDoc for Jira

But more importantly, I’d love to hear your stories. How do you manage documentation in your Agile workflows?

Looking forward to learning from your experiences!

[James Rickards (Spark-Nel)]

Please don't mis-represent the Agile Manifesto by quoting it without the prefix "Through this work we have come to value:", as this adds the context that both Working Software and Comprehensive Documentation are valued, but the former is more important to a successful outcome than the latter.

The subtlety behind the manifesto is choosing the format and nature of the documentation the team produces so that the team can respond to change with minimum effort / re-work.

When looking at this, I am thinking... if this tool is creating documentation, is that going to cause a maintenance nightmare where it would have been better to not have produced it in the first place?

Does it support updating documentation?

[Mayank_FastDoc]

Hi @James Rickards (Spark-Nel) Thanks for the reply!

You’re absolutely right—context matters when quoting the Agile Manifesto, and I really appreciate you bringing this up. My intention was never to suggest otherwise 🙂

I think I understand your concern about a maintenance nightmare. Our approach is not to automatically generate and publish documentation without oversight. FastDoc helps create the first draft quickly, but the decision to publish, share, or even discard the document is entirely up to the user and the team.

Our goal is to save time and empower product teams to share valuable information with different stakeholders, especially those who are often not in the loop like marketing, support, CSM, and other customer facing roles. I think this can create a culture of proactive information sharing and improve alignment. The current roadblock is to create tailored update for each teams, that's what we are helping with. 

Reg. your last point I’m guessing you’re asking if FastDoc can update existing documentation. While the primary use case is to create first drafts for new product updates, we recently launched support for Jira ticket attachments. I’m thinking this could work if you attach the existing document and provide the goal (we ask this during document generation to ensure quality) for updating it with new Jira tickets or specific changes. I’d need to test this out to be sure, as it might vary by use case.

Would love to hear more of your thoughts!

[Ala _Wisary_]

A big challenge is keeping documentation relevant without slowing down agile sprints. In my experience, starting documentation before any coding keeps everyone aligned from day one. Feature planning documents can serve as a ‘living record’ if they’re updated incrementally during the implementation phase. By the time development wraps up, you’ve got comprehensive documentation without any frantic catch-up. AI-driven tools that automatically capture changes from standups and sprints can help maintain that momentum, ensuring no extra overhead on the team.

[__ Jimi Wikman]

The only difference between Agile and non-Agile work is when you document, not if.

You always need to define what you need to document, which should be a non-functional requirement across the organization and not just in your team.

Once you know what you must document, which should be any form of requirement that you need to save for either financial, security or legal reasons as well as for tracking work, then you just need to figure out when the team should document it.

Some document as part of the development process, meaning that you update requirements and solutions designs as you build things. Others do it before release as a separate activity and others do it as part of their requirement process when they try to figure out the business need.

What is important though is that documentation should never be in Jira. Jira is where we process work in a temporary format. This means that all data in Jira is something you should be able to delete once it is completed at any time without it affecting your documentation. Jira also have no version control and no way to structure information, making it a bad choice for documentation.

FastDoc seems to be for release documentation, which is a small part of the documentation you are required to have. For that purpose it seems to have the functions you need, and it looks like a neat package for release management.

I don't see versions or release mentioned, but I assume there is connection to that since data packages are tracked using those for release management?

I also would like to see a connection to JSM if there is one so we can connect the version in Jira with the Change request, but this is mostly for larger organizations and situations where you don't have CI/CD setups.

Overall it looks like a nice app though.

[Mayank_FastDoc]

Hi @__ Jimi Wikman  Thanks for the feedback!

Yes, FastDoc does support release versions (including filters/JQL) as input for generating release notes, help articles, marketing copies, and other document types. You can easily pull information directly from the selected scope to create high-quality documents.

JSM integration is not fully developed yet, but in this initial phase, we do allow users to use service tickets as input for document generation, which can be especially helpful for change requests and release documentation in larger organizations.

Really appreciate your thoughts!