When discussing the recent documentation emails with a colleague today, he mentioned Confluence.
This was a great callout, since when you hear the words “design document”, you usually think about MS Word or Google Docs.
Now, both these solutions work well, as long as they are stored in the cloud. You definitely don’t want to be passing around documents with version numbers or dates.
Just imagine you’re working on “Design Doc v1.6”, while your colleague is updating “Design Doc v1.8”.
Confluence is in another category of documentation tools. Based on wiki software, Confluence, Markdown, etc. were designed from the ground up to organize community-led documentation.
Wikis are like mini-web pages, offering featuers such as templates, page links, and history tracking is built-in. Some even allow version control.
The takeaway
Wikis offer many benefits over regular documentation tools, so be sure to consider them when appropriate.