Even in an agile world there is the need for documentation which is regarded as heavy weight. Meeting minutes are useful to plan, steer, and summarize the results and decided actions for the attendees and stakeholders who did not take part in the meeting. Deployment requests may provide all information that is relevant for the deployer and interested stakeholders. Change request may provide relevant information to make a decision whether or not to conduct a change and state the reasons and expectations for that change. And there may be quality gates that need some formal process to conduct final tests for a release. It may proof to be important to agree upon these tests in advance via test specifications and document the execution of these tests via protocols.

It is certainly true that these kinds of documents are not relevant for all projects. Indeed, especially these documents need to be in demand for a stakeholder of the project. It is required that the stakeholders responsible for the product have made sure that for each relevant aspect of the product lifecycle there is a stakeholder. If there is no stakeholder interested in a particular document, this document would be considered waste and should not be created. But if there is a demand to have information stored in form of a document, people in charge for providing this information and producing this document should be supported by templates. Not to fill these forms out, but to have a guide on how this kind of document can be organized and which information is usually considered to be part of it. The structure and content must reflect the expectation of the stakeholders that require the information provided by the document.

The PDAC1 for Confluence provides doctypes for many formal documents. Every free doctype is licences under the Apache License and is available in source code on Bitbucket (please refer to the license information of each doctype add-on for more details). This will make it easier for users to adopt templates to match their specific requirements.