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A new and extremely simple way to document your software requirements

Marian Vasilescu 0

A modern and extremely effective way to organize your software processes, a new online software solution for organizing software processes. In 2020 software programming has become an extremly complicated thing to organize. Let’s start with the basics: The markdown feature in Docstell is very convenient to use. When a text zone is inserted in to a node you can start typing your markdown right away. When leaving the edit area the text is automatically formatted. The idea with markdown is that it will save you a lot of time when formatting your texts. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, which is then converted to valid HTML. Instead of getting frustrated about how a lot of common word processors format your text in every way but the one you want, markdown is very predictable and easy to learn.

Docstell is also implementing functionality to upload documents to a node. You can upload any kind of file and share with you team or keep it in a private node. Just drag it from you computer and drop it on the node you want to attach it to. They added a preview area that makes it possible to preview files adjacent to your other information. You can view for example pdf, docx, xlsx, csv, txt, png, jpeg and mpeg4 files. If you for example receive a specification in a pdf file format you keep this file here together with the rest of the documentation and will easily be able to preview it and let all your team have access to it.

Docstell uses draw.io as an integrated diagram editor. This means that you can use all the power of this popular tool. Add links to your diagrams for really smart navigation to find more information about an asset that is described somewhere in the documentation. Docstell is a realtime documentation solution that puts the collaborative work in the right place from the beginning. This means that when you need to ask a question or need feedback on your work, you put that adjacent to the source to keep a log of the discussion in the right place. This saves a lot of time both for yourself and your team mates. Find more details at Workspace for your notes, tasks and projects.

Slack integration was recently implemented to Docstell. This lets you get alerted in you preferred Slack channel when someone in your team is adding comments to your docs. From the message in Slack you get a link back to the node with the comment in Docstell, this makes it convenient to answer the question in the right context and to build up the knowledge base where it should be. If you don’t use Slack or want to be notified by email we added functionality to mention a user in the comment. Use the @ sign to get a list of users that belongs to the workspace. If this user is not online an email is sent that tells the user that there is a message waiting to be answered. You can configure if emails should be sent in the new user settings dialog.

No matter what kind of project management tool you are using or what kind of team is at your disposal, often times I find one of the causes to be lack of proper documentation, be it requirements, specifications or other kind of information that you need to be able to make correct decisions for your application or system at any given moment. It is possible that the system is documented in some way, but all too often the information is spread out in different places. Some of it might be checked in in your version control system, other parts are on a wiki, some documents are on a Sharepoint site that parts of the team don’t have access to, yet others might be in Slack or in Teams. Or even worse on a teammate’s personal hard drive or inbox. Hidden information that could have been important to make correct decisions is a huge problem.

Do you find yourself chasing the right information in a plethora of different products and services? Write documentation and stay productive using built in diagram editor, markdown and simple spreadsheets in one tool. Discover extra info at docstell.com.