With 5.5.2 recently released, now is a good time to post a summary of what we're doing to continuously improve the Release Automation documentation. Here is a list of improvements we've made during the 5.5.1 and 5.5.2 cycles (in addition to adding content for new features):
Content Improvements
- New and improved documentation is available for configuring SSL communications between components.
- Dozens of smaller improvements have been made on demand based on customer and stakeholder feedback. On our wiki platform, these updates can be published instantaneously between releases. Recent updates include fixes to LDAP integration, improvements to upgrade procedures, supported platform updates, improved action descriptions, better plugin deployment and usage documentation, and more! Watch the entire wiki or targeted pages to be notified when updates occur.
- New and improved documentation is available for working with action packs and plugins.
- Several recent action pack releases include fully documented example shared components. Example: JBoss Shared Component Workflow Examples.
Usability Improvements
- We performed a restructuring of all action pack and plug-in documentation into a new Integrations section. All action pack and plug-in documentation should be easier to find, and you will notice multiple improvements in the structure, content, and overall usability.
- We made 'under the hood' changes to our content that significantly increases the performance of the wiki site. You should notice a reduction in page load time for integration documentation.
- All help links in the product UI now point to online wiki pages. This ensures that you are always being directed to the latest content.
- The documentation is now available without a login. In addition to being a convenience, it also means that the RA documentation will now appear in Google search results.
Content Additions:
- New Best Practices documents are available that add a significant amount of depth to our content. These are a result of collaboration with the RA SWAT team, who authored the content. In addition to these great documents being available in the community, they are now fully integrated into our wiki documentation. For an example, see Tokens Best Practices. We have more of these on the way, so please provide feedback if you think these are worthy additions to the doc.
- New articles contributed by the RA Support team. Example: Working with Log Files. Again, more of these in the pipeline, and feedback/requests are welcome.
The RA doc team is working very hard to improve the documentation, and we hope you are seeing benefits from the improvements we have implemented. The team is very receptive to feedback, so please interact either by replying to this message, commenting on wiki pages, or reaching out to me directly.
Thanks,
Archer Berryman
Information Architect, CA Release Automation
archer.berryman@ca.com