Simon Wood
Top 11 best uses of Confluence
- March 10, 2020
- , 11:44 am
- , Atlassian
Confluence is a highly flexible tool, which can streamline a vast range of your organizational processes across both your software teams and your wider business departments.
The choice Confluence provides is extensive and, the good news is, you don’t need to start from scratch – Confluence comes with a range of blueprints and out-of-the-box solutions to help you seamlessly get started. In this post, we will highlight some of the top uses of Confluence.
#1 Write product requirements
Writing requirements in an agile environment can be difficult – but it’s an important undertaking to ensure everyone is on the same page across your different teams. To achieve this, Atlassian recommends creating a collaborative product requirement to hash out the details for your large and complex epics.
When your requirement document is created and its details are all in one place, your development and design teams now have one source of knowledge where they can provide immediate feedback and their input into your product. As a result, you can iterate quickly and start the required work right away.
To set this up, just start with the Product requirements blueprint; add your key details; and outline your goals, business objectives and strategic fit. Then, you can drill down and create your user stories, and drag-and-drop your UX and design files. You can find out more about setting this up here.
#2 Build a release planning page
Using Confluence, you can collect and organize all of your work and information for each release and communicate it to the rest of the business by building a release planning page.
This helps you identify your business objectives, stakeholders and roadmap; collect all the relevant information and background work; and direct your colleagues to additional info in Jira or other tools. You can find out more about this here.
#3 Create customer interview pages
You can use Confluence to document and share customer interviews, helping you gather feedback in a standardized and streamlined manner. You just need to set up a page template for your interviews, which is much simpler than putting your customer interview data in a static document. You can find out more about this here.
#4 Create sprint retrospective and demo pages
Confluence also comes with a Retrospective blueprint for your development teams. What’s more, using its page templates, you can standardize your demo pages for your Sprint demos. There’s more information on this here.
#5 Make better development decisions
Your development teams have to make tough decisions every day. Confluence comes with a Decision blueprint to help your dev teams use the same repeatable process to make decisions across your team.
Plus, as they’re recorded, you can review your decisions to learn from what went well – preventing you from repeating the same mistakes in the future. There’s more information on how to do this here.
#6 Document releases and share release notes
Documenting your software releases is an integral part of a dev team’s job to increase visibility and boost communication both inside your team and across the wider business.
Confluence streamlines this process and comes with a range of options. For example, you can use the Jira Reports Blueprint to create a Change log report or you can create public facing release notes by creating your own template. Find out more here.
#7 Use blogs to share progress
It can be difficult to keep everyone in your team and organization up to date. A Confluence blog post can help you achieve this, helping you share important news and updates across your dev team and the wider business. There are lots of different approaches that you could take. This post from Atlassian highlights three of the most popular options.
#8 Create technical and onboarding documentation
Onboarding team members can be difficult for dev teams, who need to keep pace with customer demands and maintain code quality, even with staffing changes.
To help you streamline your onboarding process, you can use Confluence to create onboarding documents and, also, technical help specific to your dev team. This saves time, providing new hires with a resource to answer all of their common questions. You can find out more here.
#9 Create a knowledge base
Of course, you can extend this work to create a company-wide knowledge base and/or technical documentation hub using Confluence. This allows your organization to centralize its documentation in one place, and you can grant access to what specific users need.
You can find out more about setting up a knowledge base of how-to and troubleshooting information here. This post from Atlassian also guides you through the process of developing technical documentation in Confluence.
#10 Use Confluence as your intranet
Your intranet is an important organizational asset – but it needs to be simple enough for non-technical users, allowing the flow of information across your company.
Confluence is a good option for your intranet, with many out-of-the-box features to boost collaboration and information sharing across your organization, whilst keeping sensitive data secure. You can find out more about the set-up process here.
#11 Create live project reports
You can also build live Jira project reports on Confluence, where Confluence macros are one of the most common methods to share live information from Jira.
For example, the Jira Issues macro can post a subset of issues, a single issue or a total count of issues in Confluence or the Jira Chart macro can post a gadget from a Jira dashboard. These are both updated to show the most current information about issues. You can find out more about reporting in Jira here.
In conclusion
Confluence is a feature-rich tool, which can be used for a vast range of use cases. When used in the right way, it can give you dev teams the agility they need to keep pace with your organizational requirements, and a means to boost their communication and visibility within the team and across your wider business.
But setting up Confluence for these use cases is no small task, and you may not have the time or in-house expertise to take these steps. If you’d like to get a Confluence expert onboard to help you boost your usage of this tool, click here to find out more.
