About cDoc

cDoc helps you implement a workflow that ensures documentation stays up to date with code changes. cDoc is a Github App that blocks pull requests from getting merged till documentation is written and approved.
What cDoc Does In A Nutshell

Who is cDoc For?

cDoc is for software development teams, especially teams who realise the importance of documentation, want to maintain documentation of their product and ensure that documentation stays up to date with constantly changing software.

Since our product requires people putting their documentation in Git, it is further only useful for people are willing to switch to doc in git workflow.

Why Was The Product Created?

We at FifthTry believe improving quality of documentation is the highest return on investment activity a software development team can do to increase their productivity and developer happiness.

We believe the lack of documentation is costing software teams. It’s harder to onboard new developers. On day to day basis if there is not enough documentation people have to ask each other a lot of questions or discover how things work by inefficient trial and error way. And finally when employees exit organisation they take with them valuable information.
Developer Waste A Lot Of Time Understanding Software

We believe the documentation is not adequate in many software teams despite them knowing the advantage of upto date documentation because of a lack of process. Code quality is acceptable in most teams because it goes through a code review and continuous integration process, in some teams it every PR also goes through manual testing. Without this process code would suffer.

Today there is no such process for documentation. Documentation quality depends on the will and effort of some team members, but due to lack of a process the documentation keeps going out of date as software keeps changing.

How Does cDoc Work?

cDoc is a Github App that you can install on your Github Repositories. You can follow this setup guide for detailed instructions on how to do it.

Once it is installed cDoc blocks the pull requests. To merge Pull Request now your team has to write the documentation in another PR, and then someone has to “connect” the code PR with documentation PR. Eventually someone has to review the code PR and verify that the doc PR is documenting the code PR as per your teams documentation standards.

The documentation is stored in a separate repository from code.
Connect Documentation PR With Code PR
To connect the code PR with doc PR one has to go to fifthtry.com. Similarly to approve the PRs one has to go fifthtry.com.
Approve That Documentation And Code Are In Sync
cDoc also post the status on Github PR so everyone working on the feature can be informed:
Comment on PR So All Collaborators Are Updated
The process is described in detail in the Taste Of cDoc on Day To Day blog post.

Open Source

cDoc is fully open source. It is developed openly on Github, with it’s code and roadmap, all issues etc publicly available to anyone under BSD license. Anyone can install cDoc and create their of Github App to use it if they want to. We offer paid SAAS solution for those who want to outsource the day to day operations to us.