Our tools shape our worldview, or Least-bad Confluence techniques

If you have been in a conference open space with me, you know that I make a terrible yuck face whenever you ask me to talk about working with Confluence. I have yet to work with an instance of Confluence that didn’t make my soul hurt. But it’s not really the technology’s fault if I hate it, is it? Isn’t it about implementation? Aren’t tools essentially neutral?

Yes and no. We talk about opinionated programming languages, but every tool has an opinion about how it should be used, a happy path. For example, the WordPress mobile app is great, and I love it for composing blog posts on the go – that’s what it was made for. But I would find it really irritating as a progress tracker if I tried to use it to replace Trello. Trello thinks in tasks and it’s hard to get it to show you the overall picture of a project. We can go through our whole toolchain like that — each piece of software we build or buy has a way it wants to be used, and although we can hack our way around that, it’s always going to be. more friction than using tools as they were intended.

Problem space

I’ve been to many DevOps Days in the last couple years, and I keep seeing the same pattern of problem.

1. Documentation exists…somewhere, but no one can find it.
2. People write documentation and no one can find it.
3. Documentation is scattered across many locations and no one can find the parts they want.
4. Standardizing or consolidating the documentation seems impossible because there’s so much of it, in so many places.

This is almost always in a Confluence shop — some people are using other wikis, some people have Word files, but the problem is really recurrent in the Confluence-using places.

Possible solutions

I have some suggestions for how you can make this better in your organization.

1. Install a better search engine. The one that comes with Confluence is remarkably unhelpful at surfacing current, relevant data. It says it’s searching on relevance, but the returns are difficult to read and frequently so outdated as to be unhelpful.
2. Break your silos. One of the ways that Confluence is opinionated is that it’s designed to work in silos. Development doesn’t automatically see marketing. Sometimes, this is intentional access control and sometimes it’s just an artifact of thinking in organization charts. Either way, it keeps people from being able to efficiently share information within a company. If you are setting up a wiki or CMS, make it as flat and open as possible. Separate items by task, not job title.
3. Delete about half of what you have. If you do an analysis, I bet you’ll. find that there is a lot of outdated information. I don’t know what it is about wikis, but they are amazing as graveyards of information that has expired. I think it may be because web pages get refreshed periodically, but it’s been true of every wiki I’ve worked with that there is a bunch of old, wrong data.
4. Put in analytics. See what people are actually using, and what they’re looking for and not finding. That’s how you know where you should focus your first efforts.
5. Have one clear purpose for each document: Is it to help tech support answer questions? Is it to document the deployment process to increase pager duty depth? Setting a clear goal for you documentation lets you check everything against that standard.

But!

Of course you can’t implement all of those solutions. Not now and maybe not ever. But you can do some of them whether or not you have buy-in from the rest of the company. Define the purpose of your company and your job and your documentation. Once you know that, you can start working toward it. Next, let the analytics run for a while, and put together a report on them.

When you realize people are trying to search on something that exists and they can’t find it, upgrade your search engine. Once your team is actually using search, you can use the same analytics to strip out low-value or never-used data to make room for more.

What do you think? What tool have you noticed changing your thinking and process? This is one of the reasons I love Monument Valley – while it has predictable rules, it also plays with the dimensions of 2D and 3D space, and it surprises us with optical illusions based on the way we portray dimensional things on a flat screen.

Let’s think about how our viewpoint is constrained by our software, and whether we can spin our point of view.