Documentation is a tech possibility, not a project management hurdle

Months ago I made a post entitled “All About Documentation.”  In it, I discussed how in order to solve the documentation problem, we needed to either give up entirely, or make a serious attempt at solving it.  I mentioned I had some tech in the works, and Hamish McKenzie mentioned some details about his technical solution as well.  Well I’m here to say that I have finally implemented our ‘CollabDocs’ framework in our game tools, and holy cow is it awesome.

Here’s some info about it:

1. Draws info from our Confluence wiki, but can be extended to draw from any source.
2. Provides contextual information when user hovers over an enabled control.
3. Tooltip can be clicked on to show the entire page, and that can be opened for edit or viewing in a browser.
4. Info can be drawn from an entire wiki page, or just an area around an anchor.
5. Can be set up entirely from Visual Studio’s Designer.
6. Documents can be set to automatically reload on a timer, so data doesn’t get stale.
7. We use this reloading mechanism to check if a page/section has changed, and can display alerts on our UI to alert the user if something has changed (some critical bug has been found, fixed, or new features have been rolled out).
8. Any system can interface with the Confluence wiki and CollabDocs will pick it up- so build notes, for example, can be propagated to the proper place on the Wiki and will show up in the tools.

The truth is, I did the easy part- I was the initial advocate, set the vision and concept, and then implemented the framework into our tools (and added some very cool features, such as anchor support, better html rendering/parsing, the auto-reloading feature, bug fixes, etc.).  The hard work was done by Chris Long, a TA we hired in the Fall (around the time I made that initial post).  He is an absolutely awesome programmer and did a bang up job with his CollabDoc framework.

I’m really happy with how this all has come out, and it hasn’t been more than 2 days of work to get it integrated well into most of our tools.  And people are excited.  About documentation. Read those last two sentences again.  This may be the first time I’ve ever written those words (maybe the first time was when I discovered wiki software?  Well we know how that worked out).  I don’t know if CollabDoc is the end-all-be-all of documentation solutions.  In fact I know it’s not.  But it is a huge step forward.  And it shows that if you put your best and brightest on a problem (here’s looking at your, Chris), you can solve it in ingenious, sophisticated, and intelligent ways.  You just need those people, you need the vision to have them work on documentation, and then you need the drive to push it home (it took us months until I finally just did it myself).

I’ll have more details about how it works, and ideas on it, going forward as I hope to do something similar at my next job.  And I’ll also be submitting some sort of documentation-focused GDC session for GDC 2012.