Scaling Doc Reviews: Addressing Timezones, PR Challenges, and Team Practices

During my early days of managing the review process for technical documentation, I encountered several barriers that hindered efficiency and collaboration. Timezone differences often delayed feedback, while the reliance on synchronous contributions through weekly pull request (PR) reviews created bottlenecks. Adding to the challenge was the lack of a unified review process across the team, leading to inconsistencies and confusion. Relying on and frequently tagging known experts in group discussions may not be the most sustainable long-term approach.

Through a new trial, adaptation, and strategic adjustments in a different group, I was able to address these challenges by implementing asynchronous workflows, fostering team communication, and standardizing review practices. This experience improved our documentation quality and streamlined collaboration, ensuring everyone could contribute effectively, regardless of where contributors work.

Let me give you a few pointers on improving the review process.

Workflow automation with GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions is an exciting innovation that opens possibilities beyond traditional CI/CD. It has the potential to streamline workflows across various tasks, from deploying static documentation sites to automating repetitive tasks, improving collaboration, and ensuring consistency. GitHub Actions is free for public repositories.

Git Bot Integration with messenger apps

Messenger apps such as Mattermost or Matrix serve as the central platform where open-source communities can discuss project roadmaps, feature requests, and bug fixes in dedicated channels. It replaces traditional communication tools like email or forums with real-time and asynchronous messaging. Bot integrations automate workflows, such as notifications for code reviews, checklists, or CI build status. Mattermost provides an open-source alternative to proprietary communication platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams, making it more appealing to open-source projects that prefer free, modifiable, and self-hosted solutions.

Mattermost supports integration with GitHub, GitLab, and other version control systems.

Example Use Cases I enjoy day-to-day working with an enterprise Linux community are;

• Notify the team in Mattermost when a pull request is ready for review.
• Display checklist for writers and reviewers.
• Post CI/CD build results in a specific channel after documentation builds.
• Automatically update documentation contributors on issue assignments or status changes.

Automated notifications reduce manual checking of repositories. Checklist specification examples (CHECKLIST.yml) are;

paths:
  "README.md":
    - Did you remember to add code examples for newly added methods?
    - Did you make sure that all the example code still functions as expected?
    - Did you remember to update screenshots to match new updates?
  "src/components/**/*.js":
    - Did you check that the component visual look still matches design documents?
  "docs/**":
    - Did you run changes past the Docs team?        

When working with a large community of over 1,000 contributors, it becomes clear that relying on tagging known experts for every decision or task creates a single point of failure. In such a large-scale environment, the expertise of a few individuals should not be the bottleneck for progress. Instead, a well-defined workflow ensures that tasks are distributed, reviewed, and completed efficiently without overburdening any single contributor. By implementing structured processes, such as automated notifications, predefined review cycles, and task delegation, you ensure that knowledge is shared across the team, reducing the risk of delays or burnout and allowing the community to scale more effectively.

Photo: Roman Synkevych, Unsplaah