- Created by Robert Reiner, last modified on 26. May 2017
You want to track your findings? Either with your team or individual? The projectdoc Toolbox supports teams to create project or team journals and individual team members to keep a professional diary.
- Categories
In projects it is often necessary to log events. These logs are collected in form of journals. As time passes by teams are able to find information on decisions or dates at which interesting events happened. This information may also be valuable for external stakeholders, team members returning from vacation or new team members joining a team or project. Journals have the handy property that they contain only records. Records do not need to be updated. Therefore the maintenance costs for keeping a journal are very low.
There are different types of journals to keep:
- Developer Diary
- A developer diary collects interesting information or decisions made by an individual developer. This is not a private diary and is typically accessible for all members of the team.
- Team Journal
- Teams may collect information that is relevant for them to complete their iteration and the committed amount of work successfully. The journal is divided into sections to store relevant information collected during the team's iteration. At the end of the iteration it is easy for the team to see what has happened. While the developer diary is only write-accessible by the developer, every team member is allowed to add information to the team journal.
- Project Journal
- A project journal keeps track of events relevant to the project. The project journal may summarize or simply reference the journals at the team level. The project journal may contain additional strategic information or events from outside the teams.
- Spike Journal
- If a team is investigating on a new topic, the information is typically also aggregated in a spike journal. The journal is typically created in a new space. At the end of the spike all information that is relevant for the project, is wrapped up and integrated into the project documentation. The space containing the spike journal can then be archived.
Resources
Information Material
The following list of resources provides background information on creating and working with journals based on the projectdoc Toolbox for Confluence..
| Resource | Short Description | Type |
|---|---|---|
The recommended way of creating a diary with the Developer's Diary Add-on is to add a page with the Diary Template in one's Personal Space. | topic | |
A short introduction to developer diaries. | topic | |
Provides doctypes to organize the developer's work by the employment of a diary. Take you personal planning and professional records to the next level! | topic | |
Provides doctypes to collborate with your team. Run iterations and record discoveries that may be of interest at the end of the iteration or for even later reference. Quick notes are more easily added as records to the team's space than to the official documentation tree. Defer the talk to the documentation architect to the end of the iteration (if the discovery is still of interest). | topic | |
Get started with the projectdoc Toolbox: learning by doing | topic | |
Concepts central to projectdoc. Things users have to understand to get the most out of using projectdoc. | topic |
Doctypes
The following doctypes (blueprints based on the projectdoc Toolbox) provided page blueprints to create a journal.
| Resource | Short Description | Categories |
|---|---|---|
Document an Iteration that may be linked from JIRA. Allows the team to set the goal and add notes relevant to a particular iteration. | ||
Store relevant information discovered today in your developer diary. | ||
Associated an event with a day. A event is a collection of associated information for your later reference. Information may further be organized by subject, tags, categories, and audience. | ||
Resources are books, webpages, videocasts relevant for the project. Add important information to your project about resources that lie outside the control of your team. | ||
A description of a given topic. A topic may describing or explaining a concept, a task to accomplish or a reference. There are a couple of topic types that set the expectations for the reader. Instances of the topic doctype usually have independent lifetimes from any referencing documents. | ||
Sections of a document are typically part of a document. But the size of sections may vary. To support a team to write collaboratively on the documentation, a larger document may be subdivided into external section documents. | ||
Defines a role with its responsibilities, tasks and requirements. Roles are incorporated by stakeholders who take interest in the project. The are also used to define the audience for documents. | ||
A party that takes interest in a project. The stakeholder is either a real person, an organization or group, or represents a class of individuals, groups or organizations. |
Macros
The following macros of the projectdoc Toolbox support creating or working with a journal.
| Resource | Short Description | Categories |
|---|---|---|
Renders a section, if the body is not empty. Supports authors to create content, clutter-free rendering without empty sections. Allows to transclude the content. | ||
Transcludes content from a document marked with the content marker macro. | ||
Lists references to projectdoc documents in a table. Allows to select document properties for columns. Also non-list representations are provided. | ||
Renders a predefined list of documents in a table. |
