Confluence for Agile Teams
There's a common misconception that agile projects don't have any documentation. This is simply incorrect. Agile projects do have documentation, however, they aren't as focused on creating and maintaining it as a waterfall project might be. Agile teams may also have different requirements of their documentation system, for example needing it to integrate with ticketing, or provide faster ways to create information.
This means that agile teams still have a need for maintaining and sharing documentation. And given it's an agile project, whatever solution they use should also be lightweight and tailored to their needs. Fortunately Confluence meets both these (and many other!) needs.
Confluence agility
When I think of agile documentation, I think of documentation that captures the bare minimum information needed to move the team forward or to meet the needs of the customer. This necessitates a platform that can be configured to accept the minimal amount of information a team decides to add, but also ensure it's easily accessible.
Confluence helps solve the “capture information quickly” requirement with templates. Templates allow content creators to quickly spin up new pages, and removes the need for them to consider things like formatting. By taking a few minutes at the start of a project an agile team can put together templates that speed up information capture, and also keep creators on track to ensure they're not over documenting. This helps ensure that teams can stay focused on providing value to customers - and not fighting to get columns aligned.
Templates offer some other features, like the ability to be pre-configured with labels, meaning they'll easily tie pages created from them back into search, macros and other features that make information organization and retrieval easy. While this benefits any type of project, it further supports Agile teams by automating the need to add those labels.
This isn't to say the team can't deviate from templates. There will be occasions they'll need to go ‘off script’, however, Agile teams can likely think through the most commonly needed documents and template them out. Examples include:
Retrospectives
Sprint planning
Team updates
Sprint review
Technical documentation
Even better, Confluence comes preloaded with a number of these as blueprints. These make it even easier to get started since you can just use one off the shelf. That said, teams should take time to tailor the existing blueprints to meet their needs.
Automations
There are many aspects of knowledge management that are highly mechanical. For example, archiving documents after a certain age, or alerting the team when new content is created. While a human could certainly perform these actions, it sucks up time and energy. Fortunately Confluence has an answer in the form of automations.
These are just rules you setup to enforce specific actions. For example, you might archive meeting notes after 3 months to ensure your space is free of clutter. Or you may alert the page owner when a page is attached to a Jira ticket. Or almost any other manual action you can think of.
This ability to automate away tasks makes automations incredibly valuable to agile teams, and is another great example of allowing the team to focus on building value and not fighting with systems.
Jira Integration
There are many aspects of knowledge management that are highly mechanical. For example, archiving documents after a certain age, or alerting the team when new content is created. While a human could certainly perform these actions, it sucks up time and energy. Fortunately Confluence has an answer in the form of automations.
These are just rules you setup to enforce specific actions. For example, you might archive meeting notes after 3 months to ensure your space is free of clutter. Or you may alert the page owner when a page is attached to a Jira ticket. Or almost any other manual action you can think of.
This ability to automate away tasks makes automations incredibly valuable to agile teams, and is another great example of allowing the team to focus on building value and not fighting with systems.
Jira Integration
If a team is using Confluence they're also likely using Jira to track their work. This gives agile teams even more options for simplifying their documentation as Jira and Confluence are highly integrated.
Typically I use this integration to pull tickets for upcoming sprints into Confluence pages, or to display tickets from the prior sprint in a review or retrospective. This helps streamline those meetings as we don't have to switch between systems when discussing our plans or reviewing our progress.
There are also some interesting things you can do with Confluence white boards. An upcoming feature will include ‘smart sections’.This allows teams to drag and drop tickets over a section and change a field on the Jira ticket. For example, a team could have one section per team member, and just drag tickets over their section to assign them.
This is another example of speeding up the team by shifting where an action is needed. Sure they could go into Jira and move tickets, but if they're already in Confluence planning the sprint, why not stay in Confluence?
Linking to tickets
Another way Confluence helps speed up teams is by linking Confluence pages directly to Jira tickets. This doesn't seem like much, however, it helps shorten the distance a team member has to go in order to get what they need.
For example, instead of having to go into Confluence to look up a specific page, a developer can click on a link on their ticket and see exactly what they need. This might only save a few minutes, but that adds up - both in terms of time and in terms of frustration - over the project.
I commonly find myself linking high-level project documents to tickets - things like product requirement documents, scope requirements etc. This helps ensure my team has instant access to contextual information that will help them make the best decisions possible when they begin work.
Structure
Confluence also offers a number of great options for storing information. For example, a team may have a new space for each project, and then archive the entire space when they’re done. This allows them to review information as needed to help improve future projects. Access can also be shared across an organization, allowing other teams to benefit from lessons learned by one team, further amplifying their value.
Teams have a wide range of options in terms of structuring information. This gives Agile teams the flexibility they need to create and store documentation, while still making it available to others. For example, one Agile team could choose to use a single space for all the information, while another uses different ones. This is fine, as Confluence will allow them to search and link between teams with issues.
Wrap
Every project will generate some amount of documentation, and it is important for teams, even Agile teams, to keep track of it all. Fortunately Confluence offers a number of different ways for Agile teams to do just that.
