Where do you store your onboarding documentation?

With the myriad of tools, tips and tricks that can exist in a team, onboarding can be a fun challenge :grin:

I used to store our onboarding documentation on our gitbook repository along with the user guides for our application. Before that, they were stored in just my brain though :see_no_evil:

Where do you store your onboarding documentation?

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I’m onboarding at the moment…there is so much stuff to trawl through…whether it’s in some central repository, training sites, HR resources, Benefits and so on. It’s a bit of a minefield, knowing where to get the right information.

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Confluence and/or Google drive or similar. I prefer confluence over G drive. I have also seen some nice examples of documentation on Notion https://www.notion.so, but I don’t know how good it is for a company.

My criteria for selecting a source:

1 - Has plenty of tools/options for formatting and visualization.
2 - Excellent search capabilities.
3 - Can give structure to documents like table of contents, footnotes, attachments etc.
4 - Can easily allow me to organize documents.
5 - Is pretty to read.
6 - Supports code formatting.
7 - Allows users to give feedback easily easily & stores them neatly.
8 - Tracks changes like version control & can notify people when something is changed.
9 - Can play content (e.g videos, pdf etc.) without having to download and play.

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I’ve got stuff all over the place! :joy: Only partly joking. Our test coommunity has a ā€œtest handbookā€ built with MKDocs which contains lots of stuff. Onboarding info, links to other useful places, docs, process stuff, guides etc. It needs to be tidied, but its meant to be ā€œthe placeā€ for test info.

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We used to have a tonne of documentation stored in our Azure DevOps wiki. It was a good way to store things because it was searchable and always accessible.
Then we realised that it was rarely and poorly maintained and no one was really using it.
Recently I started to use mind maps for tips, useful heuristics, team composition and test environment set up that we store on our document management system. I don’t think we document anything else…

We give any new starts a tour of the application we are currently testing and task them with learning it.
We give them a charter and ask them to spend a fixed amount of time surveying the app with the purpose of learning and to raise any bugs they encounter.
A follow-up task is to create a product coverage outline (a list of all testable elements that they can identify). This is essentially a formal model of what they think the application is and what it does.
After each task we also ask for a session report to encourage note taking and to get them familiar with high accountability exploratory testing.
We debrief them and use these meetings for coaching.

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