RVO Health is the largest health company you’ve probably never heard of—serving over 100 million users monthly across its portfolio of brands. As RVO Health grew, effective documentation management and code quality became crucial. However, each team had its own way of documenting code, making it challenging to maintain organized and up-to-date knowledge. They quickly realized the need for a better solution.
Swimm and Backstage gave us the documentation backbone we needed to support our scaling engineering organization.
Ryan McKenna, Staff Engineer at RVO Health
The problem
Before adopting Swimm, RVO Health’s documentation wasn’t just difficult to manage—it was impossible to keep up to date.
Developers would spend hours searching for information, only to realize it was outdated or incomplete. Each team had its own way of handling internal knowledge, and there was no single place to find all of the information needed to move projects forward.
Developers were constantly stuck trying to piece together information from different sources, which slowed down their work and made it harder to collaborate across teams.
Even the most experienced developers had trouble finding up-to-date information.
We knew documentation was a problem, but no one wanted to own it because it was time-consuming and usually outdated by the time we finished writing it.
Ryan McKenna, Staff Engineer at RVO Health
The solution
RVO Health had already adopted Backstage, becoming a centralized resource where all of the company’s internal tools, documentation, and services were organized. Backstage gave RVO Health a way to standardize their internal processes and make information easier to find. But they still faced the problem of keeping TechDocs up to date.
RVO Health started creating documentation using Swimm. Our plugin for Backstage would then publish documents directly into TechDocs.
Swimm’s Auto-sync feature makes sure that whenever code changes, the related documentation automatically updates, too. This eliminated the problem of outdated documentation and made it easier for engineers to trust the information they were seeing.
By combining Swimm’s unique ability to keep documentation updated with Backstage’s centralized platform, RVO Health streamlined how they managed knowledge across the organization. This made it easier for developers to find and contribute to documentation without leaving their regular workflows.
Swimm supercharged our ability to maintain context-specific documentation. Now, engineers write documentation as they code, and Swimm makes sure it stays up-to-date.
Ryan McKenna, Staff Engineer at RVO Health
The impact
Faster development, few bottlenecks
With documentation now directly linked to the code, developers no longer spend hours digging through different sources to understand how things work. This has led to fewer bottlenecks and faster development cycles.
Engineers can now find what they need and start coding right away. It’s been a huge boost to productivity.
Ryan McKenna, Staff Engineer at RVO Health
Improved collaboration across teams
One unexpected benefit was the impact on non-engineering teams. Backstage made Swimm’s technical documentation accessible to product managers and business leaders, allowing them to get insights without needing to ask an engineer.
Business and product teams can see the same documentation as engineers, which has bridged a huge knowledge gap.
Ryan McKenna, Staff Engineer at RVO Health
A single source of truth
The biggest change is that documentation is now reliable. Developers can trust that what they see is accurate and up-to-date, which has boosted their confidence when working on new projects or tackling unfamiliar parts of the codebase.
With Swimm and Backstage, documentation is no longer an afterthought—it’s part of the development process
Ryan McKenna, Staff Engineer at RVO Health
Better documentation quality
One of the key factors for success was making it easy for developers to write (or use AI to generate) and update documentation. With Swimm integrated directly into the development workflow, contributing to documentation required minimal extra effort.
Make it as easy as possible for people to write documentation, and you’ll see adoption skyrocket.
Ryan McKenna, Staff Engineer at RVO Health
Conclusion
RVO Health’s integration of Swimm and Backstage turned their chaotic, outdated documentation into a streamlined, up-to-date knowledge system. Developers now have a single place to find reliable information, and non-technical teams have better visibility into engineering processes.
By treating documentation like a product and integrating it into everyday workflows, RVO Health set a new standard for managing code knowledge—one that others can learn from.
