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His org used jira but not confluence? Why couldn't they just document these things in confluence? Edit: This is a serious question. What is that value prop of

His org used jira but not confluence? Why couldn't they just document these things in confluence? Edit: This is a serious question. What is that value prop of backstage over confluence?

1123581321 4y ago
Structure of the data and more pleasant/immediate workflow increases adoption so it doesn’t go stale, like Confluence so often does. Some teams need those nudges more than others due to personality, turnover, speed of growth and complexity of service architecture.
skrtskrt 4y ago
backstage has plugins that can help with autodiscovery of a lot of this stuff. The stuff that's not autodiscovered can live right next to your code, in any repository, so devs can just update some YAML keys when they're making other changes. You can lint the backstage changes as part of PRs Also I've never ever seen developers consistently keep stuff up to date in Confluence. There's just so much friction in that interface.
- mcdonje 4y ago
  Auto-discovery does sound appealing. Thank you.
rdonovan 4y ago
Author here. We did use Confluence, but as other folks had said, it went very stale. Not everyone could edit everything and there was no structure. Confluence is a mess in my experience.
- WesleyJohnson 4y ago
  Have to agree. Without a clear set of standards on how to structure things, it ends up being chaos very quickly. We had a PM for a while, who gravitated more towards QA, and when they got ahold of Confluence they went crazy (in a mostly good way). We had so many great "How To" articles on how to perform various tasks in our system form an internal user perspective, all authored by the same SME. Unfortunately, given their affinity for testing things, the How To docs starting taking on that QA perspective and everything ended up in a QA "space". Sure, it's easy to move them around, but there wasn't a clear cut way on how to separate the "How To" from the "QA" - and then they left. Since then, people add things when managers say "make sure that's in Confluence" and it ends up getting placed in the areas they're most familiar with, not necessarily where it should be. Add in the aforementioned lack of standards and no two documents look the same. Then we started using Confluence for devs to write Test Plans and QA to execute them - and now it just makes my brain hurt whenever I have to go in there. Some of it is a cultural problem: we're email and Teams heavy and so much of our "documentation" is buried in those tools. So then we adopt something like Confluence to move our knowledge base to that, but finding stuff in Teams is a nightmare (posted in another thread on that). So now rather than having one tool to rule them all, we just have another half-baked attempt. We're monolithic for the most part, so I'm not sure Backstage would help us, but the article mentioned Stack Overflow for Teams, so maybe that would? (insert relevant XKCD here on competing standards)
- polotics 4y ago
  Also Confluence and JIRA end up weirdly competing, with information spread between the two, sliced up chronologically in JIRA, and based on some a-priori and/or competing sets of structurations...
- antod 4y ago
  It doesn't help that Confluence has one of the most irritatingly useless search engines in existence.

His org used jira but not confluence? Why couldn't they just document these things in confluence? Edit: This is a serious question. What is that value prop of backstage over confluence?

1123581321 4y ago

Structure of the data and more pleasant/immediate workflow increases adoption so it doesn’t go stale, like Confluence so often does. Some teams need those nudges more than others due to personality, turnover, speed of growth and complexity of service architecture.

skrtskrt 4y ago

backstage has plugins that can help with autodiscovery of a lot of this stuff. The stuff that's not autodiscovered can live right next to your code, in any repository, so devs can just update some YAML keys when they're making other changes. You can lint the backstage changes as part of PRs Also I've never ever seen developers consistently keep stuff up to date in Confluence. There's just so much friction in that interface.

mcdonje 4y ago
Auto-discovery does sound appealing. Thank you.

rdonovan 4y ago

Author here. We did use Confluence, but as other folks had said, it went very stale. Not everyone could edit everything and there was no structure. Confluence is a mess in my experience.

WesleyJohnson 4y ago
Have to agree. Without a clear set of standards on how to structure things, it ends up being chaos very quickly. We had a PM for a while, who gravitated more towards QA, and when they got ahold of Confluence they went crazy (in a mostly good way). We had so many great "How To" articles on how to perform various tasks in our system form an internal user perspective, all authored by the same SME. Unfortunately, given their affinity for testing things, the How To docs starting taking on that QA perspective and everything ended up in a QA "space". Sure, it's easy to move them around, but there wasn't a clear cut way on how to separate the "How To" from the "QA" - and then they left. Since then, people add things when managers say "make sure that's in Confluence" and it ends up getting placed in the areas they're most familiar with, not necessarily where it should be. Add in the aforementioned lack of standards and no two documents look the same. Then we started using Confluence for devs to write Test Plans and QA to execute them - and now it just makes my brain hurt whenever I have to go in there. Some of it is a cultural problem: we're email and Teams heavy and so much of our "documentation" is buried in those tools. So then we adopt something like Confluence to move our knowledge base to that, but finding stuff in Teams is a nightmare (posted in another thread on that). So now rather than having one tool to rule them all, we just have another half-baked attempt. We're monolithic for the most part, so I'm not sure Backstage would help us, but the article mentioned Stack Overflow for Teams, so maybe that would? (insert relevant XKCD here on competing standards)
polotics 4y ago
Also Confluence and JIRA end up weirdly competing, with information spread between the two, sliced up chronologically in JIRA, and based on some a-priori and/or competing sets of structurations...
antod 4y ago
It doesn't help that Confluence has one of the most irritatingly useless search engines in existence.