

Ask HN: Best practices of a dev team site - dv35z

Our small tech team (within a company) is rapidly growing, and with all the new people onboard, it is evident we really need a centralized intranet site. Email lists, Dropbox&#x2F;Google drive are not sufficient anymore to provide a single landing area for everyone to find what they need. There is a lot of re-inventing the wheel, and not enough information capture&#x2F;sharing between groups &amp; projects.<p>Does anyone have any good examples of team sites for software development teams? Or (if sites not public), a list of common areas&#x2F;topics which ideally would live on a team site. The objective is to have a centralized area where new team members can quickly get up to speed, and for existing team members to share information &amp; reduce siloed information (which today exists all over the place).<p>Examples of topics I am thinking:<p>* Product documentation (structured information about our products &amp; services)
* Processes (e.g. onboarding new developers, setting up your dev environment; initiating a project)
* Resources &amp; Tools (links to internal&#x2F;external tools required for the job, commonly referenced documents;)
* Role definitions (define each role, what activities are required, etc)
* Training materials (documents, videos, etc)
* PM stuff (e.g. Jira, dashboards, bug trackers)
* Customers (standard structured information about each of our customers; support notes)
* Templates (templates for nearly every customer-facing artifact; project plans, email templates, presentations, etc)<p>* News&#x2F;company updates (blog area)
* Team meetings (notes, news, etc)
* About the team (who we are, how we work, team bio&#x27;s, etc. For identity, but also for other groups in the corporation to get to know us)<p>Would love to hear everyone else&#x27;s ideas. For this site, I am considering using Atlassian Confluence. But if there are better alternatives out there that are more suitably purposed, would be great to hear about them.<p>Thanks - looking forward to everyone&#x27;s ideas!
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r3trosteve
Honestly, most of that stuff is not isolated to Dev teams specifically, and
for that intranet style approach, we've found Podio very useful - believe me,
we evaluated a lot of products in this area.

Between Podio, Trello and Slack, along with Mural.ly (honestly, check it out)
we have a pretty slick system. That doesn't even touch on the more dev
specific continuous integration tools of choice.

Otherwise I think you're look at a custom web app to serve all your specific
needs, sounds like a startup idea...

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thisworldofours
Probably more abstract, but you could definitely use a wiki-style web page.
You could have a "Get Started" page for new folks. Documentation for
applications and internal services can be included in one place as well.
Additionally, make use of the search features. It's also really easy to get
updated - you don't need to shuffle docs around and get the latest version,
etc.

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heelhook
I have used Atlassian Confluence for that in the past and it works pretty well
for that task. Pretty much any wiki would do, its mostly a matter of how you
decide to structure the information.

My advice: start slowly and grow organically; documentation can be prematurely
optimized.

