Documentation Makeover Bot - 2024 Hacks With Friends Pitch 14

Link to presentation poster

During the 2-day "Hacks With Friends" event at the University of Michigan, our team collaborated to develop the "Documentation Makeover Bot," a tool designed to streamline and enhance technical documentation. Using the U-M Maizey platform, this innovative bot reviews existing technical documents on a given topic from a source library, and consolidates them into a single, well-formatted and accessible document. This newly created document is ready for review by a subject matter expert. Once approved, the document is loaded to an updated documentation library.

To get a working bot in the allotted time, we chose the tools we were most proficient with, specifically PowerShell and Python scripts, to interact with the Maizey and Google Documents API interfaces. These technologies enabled our bot to efficiently generate new documents and seamlessly upload them into a Google Documents library. The result is a user-friendly, organized system that reduces redundancy and improves the clarity and accessibility of technical documentation.

A Documentation Makeover Bot like ours can provide significant value to teams and departments of the university by addressing the common challenge of maintaining high-quality, up-to-date documentation. It optimizes the process of document consolidation and formatting, and would make it easier for staff and faculty to produce and manage essential technical documents efficiently.

Category

Current trends/topics/projects

Areas of Focus

  • Administration
  • Michigan Technology Community

Objectives

By documenting our process and our lessons learned we hope to provide a framework for other teams and units to build their own documentation bot to improve and update their shared documentation. Perhaps that might inspire the development of a universal application that would allow teams to securely select their own "before" and "after" repositories.

Collaborators

Kristin Kovarik, Database Administrator Lead, ITS Systems Operations

Kyle Espinoza, Virtualization & Cloud Infrastructure Senior, ITS Systems Operations

Leslie Bell, HPC Storage Engineer Associate, College of Lit, Science & Arts

Ruth Shamraj, Technical Writer Intermediate, Michigan Medicine