A broken system for sharing technical knowledge
Quadric is a market leader in the neural processing space. Their engineering team faced a significant challenge: making sure their documentation remained up-to-date with the latest code changes. They also were looking for a solution that would encourage developers to prioritize documentation updates as they were making changes to code.
Initially, Quadric hired a team of technical writers tasked with keeping the documentation current. However, the team was in an endless loop of playing catch up, leading to a system that not only failed to meet its objectives, but also negatively impacted velocity and productivity.
The system wasn’t working and greatly impacted our ability to ship products quickly.
Jon Bunting, Product Manager @ Quadric
Adopting a developer-first solution
Compared to our old docs solution in Confluence, Swimm docs are better integrated with code, are always up-to-date, and are more accessible by developers that install the Swimm IDE plugin.
Jon Bunting, Product Manager @ Quadric
Quadric’s developers sought a solution that would integrate documentation seamlessly into the SDLC, something they weren’t achieving with Confluence. With Swimm, any changes developers make that affect documentation trigger notifications, preventing code merges until documentation discrepancies are addressed.
This change has made documentation maintenance far simpler, transforming it from a chore into a manageable part of the development process—a stark contrast to their experience with Confluence. Moreover, Swimm’s IDE plugin further enhances documentation accessibility and discoverability for the entire team.
The transformative impact of up to date docs
By integrating Swimm, documentation responsibility shifted from a dedicated team of technical writers to the developers themselves. This shift allows technical writers to concentrate on other tasks on their critical paths rather than monitoring engineering changes for potential documentation impacts. Now that documentation is an integral part of Quadric’s CI/CD process, leadership recognized it no longer posed an obstacle to product releases. This realization marked a significant turning point in how documentation is perceived and maintained over time.
The wow moment for our team was when leadership realized that docs were no longer a blocker to product releases
Jon Bunting, Product Manager @ Quadric
