Software projects require much more than just issues and code. A ton happens behind the scenes: customer interviews, feature requirements, release plans, team retrospectives… you know the drill. Your team is constantly working to add detail, context, and even delight to your product. That’s where Confluence comes in.

Confluence is the home for all the information your development team needs to keep projects moving forward.

SwTGtC_blog_hero_image

The Software Team’s Guide to Confluence ebook is a collection of pro tips and step-by-step tutorials – tailor-made for software teams – that’ll show you how to use Confluence for creating, organizing, and documenting the information your team needs to make awesome products.

Quick tips for software teams from the guide

The guide is chock-full of useful Confluence tips and tricks, but also has a ton of best practices and guidance from Atlassian development teams. Here’s a quick look at 3 tips from the guide:

1. Create a single source of truth for your releases

Releasing great software requires a lot of hard work and coordination between individuals and teams. We use a Confluence page to collect and organize all the work and information for each release, and to communicate what it’s all about to the rest of the business. There are three key elements to the release planning page:

  • Capturing key details – The page outlines objectives and stakeholders, and contains links to relevant Jira epics.
  • Collecting background information – You can reference workshop notes, designs, analytics, and customer interviews that live in other pages.
  • Visualizing the plan – We use a lightweight roadmapping tool that comes included in Confluence to visualize all work streams associated with a release.

pageoverview

2. Maintain traceability between Jira and Confluence for your product requirements

The most important aspects of a good product requirement doc is that it creates a shared understanding among your entire development team and provides context for the epic and user stories related to it in Jira. Creating your requirements in Confluence make it easy for anyone – PM, project lead, or developer – to quickly trace an issue they’re working on back to the requirement, or vice versa.

product-requirement-jira-links

3. Standardize and document your sprint retros and demos for continuous improvement

The best teams are the ones that take every opportunity to improve. For agile teams, every sprint offers the chance for your team to improve on your product, process, and workflows. Our teams document all of their sprint retrospectives and demos using a template in Confluence.

The beauty of documenting them in Confluence is they are always organized and accessible to anyone who needs to reference them. Even if your team is distributed, you can always check out what went well, what didn’t, and what got shipped during a sprint.

sprint-retros

Get the guide today!

You can read the guide online or download the ebook from the button below.

Get the ebook now

New ebook: the software team’s guide to Confluence