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GrabKaren KueExplainer
From decentralized Docs-as-Code to a centralized repository: Evolving Grab's documentation strategy
Summary
Grab adopted Docs-as-Code in early 2021 to bring technical documentation into engineers’ code workflows, addressing scattered sources, version confusion, discoverability, and quality gaps. Documentation was written in Markdown, stored in version-controlled repositories, reviewed through merge requests, checked in CI/CD, and surfaced through an internal developer portal. As engineering scaled, decentralized repositories produced inconsistent structures and terminology, unreliable organization-wide quality automation, aging content, and tracking problems when source locations changed. Grab therefore moved to a centralized repository while retaining Docs-as-Code, adding shared templates and linters, unified search through fuzzy title lookup and Glean, automated synchronization during migration, and training and feedback programs. The post concludes that decentralized, centralized, or hybrid models fit different contexts, with centralization emphasizing discoverability, governance, consistency, ownership metadata, and analytics.
Context
Grab’s decentralized Docs-as-Code model initially created a single source of truth and tied documentation updates to engineering workflows. As the organization expanded, documentation became fragmented across repositories, standards diverged, organization-wide quality checks were difficult to enforce, content aged quickly, and repository-location changes hindered tracking and discovery.
Approach / What changed
Grab moved documentation into a centralized Markdown repository while retaining Docs-as-Code practices. The transition added shared document templates, automated linters, unified search using fuzzy page-title lookup and Glean, automated synchronization during migration, and training and feedback programs.
Takeaways
Decentralized repositories encouraged service-team ownership and kept documentation closely coupled to code, but produced inconsistent information architecture, terminology, navigation, and quality practices at scale.
The centralized repository supports organization-wide linters and templates, while its global search combines fuzzy page-title navigation with Glean-powered search across TechDocs content.
Grab recommends choosing among decentralized, centralized, and hybrid models based on autonomy, service coupling, discoverability, governance, ownership metadata, analytics, and review needs.
Source and freshness
- Source
- engineering.grab.com
- Published
- Added to Yomu
- Last updated
Summaries are generated from the original by a language model. Check the original before relying on it.
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