- Created by Robert Reiner, last modified on 31. Dec 2017
Make all decisions, issues, and project relevant resources easily accessible for your team. This includes meeting minutes, stakeholder contact information, open issues, and identified risks with their mitigation strategy.
- Categories
Even in an agile world there is the need for documentation which is regarded as heavy weight. Meeting minutes are useful to plan, steer, and summarize the results and decided actions for the attendees and stakeholders who did not take part in the meeting. Deployment requests may provide all information that is relevant for the deployer and interested stakeholders. Change request may provide relevant information to make a decision whether or not to conduct a change and state the reasons and expectations for that change. And there may be quality gates that need some formal process to conduct final tests for a release. It may proof to be important to agree upon these tests in advance via test specifications and document the execution of these tests via protocols.
It is certainly true that these kinds of documents are not relevant for all projects. Indeed, especially these documents need to be in demand for a stakeholder of the project. It is required that the stakeholders responsible for the product have made sure that for each relevant aspect of the product lifecycle there is a stakeholder. If there is no stakeholder interested in a particular document, this document would be considered waste and should not be created. But if there is a demand to have information stored in form of a document, people in charge for providing this information and producing this document should be supported by templates. Not to fill these forms out, but to have a guide on how this kind of document can be organized and which information is usually considered to be part of it. The structure and content must reflect the expectation of the stakeholders that require the information provided by the document.
No Noise
The projectdoc Toolbox supports the practice of Focus on Content and No Noise. The blueprint provides all properties (data and metadata) and sections that may be relevant for a document of a given type. If the authors of the document decide to not provide a given information – either because it is not easily available (ill ratio between the cost of acquiring it and the positive effect it would have if presented) or is simply not relevant – the reader does not stumble over sections with headings but no body or tables with property names but no values. Empty sections and properties are rendered in edit, but are not rendered in view mode (see Section Macro and Document Properties Marker Macro for details).
For more information on values, principles, and practices refer to Agile Documentation.
The projectdoc Toolbox for Confluence provides doctypes for many formal documents. Every free doctype is licences under the Apache License and is available in source code on Bitbucket (please refer to the license information of each doctype add-on for more details). This will make it easier for users to adopt templates to match their specific requirements.
Resources
Information Material
The following list of resources provides background information on creating and working with project management tasks based on the projectdoc Toolbox for Confluence.
| Resource | Short Description | Type |
|---|---|---|
Use products (templates) from the V-Modell®XT in your Confluence wiki as blueprints! | topic | |
Provides doctypes for documenting decisions, risks, open issues, and meeting minutes. | 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 | |
A gentle introduction to page blueprints provided by doctype add-ons. The page blueprints are grouped semantically to make it easier for users to build a conceptual mind map for them. | topic | |
Concepts central to projectdoc. Things users have to understand to get the most out of using projectdoc. | topic |
Related doctype add-ons are
| Resource | Short Description | Type |
|---|---|---|
Provides doctypes to create documentation in software development projects. The focus is on documenting the architecture of the product, but it includes templates for other software development documentation requirements as well. | topic | |
Provides doctypes to document services and systems for IT service management (ITSM). | topic |
Doctypes
The following doctypes (blueprints with additional metadata based on the projectdoc Toolbox) provided page blueprints to create and maintain a project management documentation.
| Resource | Short Description | Categories |
|---|---|---|
Record the action items of a meeting. | ||
Document a decision for an option. This is useful to state the reasons and the options that have been evaluated. Later other team members will have it easier to understand the decision. | ||
Open issues document what the team needs to know to proceed. | ||
Document an Iteration that may be linked from JIRA. Allows the team to set the goal and add notes relevant to a particular iteration. | ||
Record the discussion of the team about their last iteration. | ||
Plan and run your review meeting. | ||
User Stories document a requirement of a stakeholder with a specific business goal. It also provides an acceptance test. It is a representation of a unit of work. |
For doctypes provided for V-Modell®XT please refer to Doctypes for V-Modell®XT.
Macros
The following macros of the projectdoc Toolbox support creating or working with a project management documentation.
| Resource | Short Description | Categories |
|---|---|---|
Renders a template with property references. | ||
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. | ||
Transclude text content from a remote server. | ||
Transclude content from a resource from a remote system. | ||
Renders an image transcluded from a remote server. | ||
Renders an image transcluded from a remote server. |
