Tired of a fractured feedback loop because all of your stakeholders are concurrently not available, or the nuance of utilizing one screen to go through design reviews? At Stoplight, we believe design reviews should be derived from anywhere and in real-time. Improve communication and asynchronous collaboration, and enable dialogue to occur within the product. Stoplight would like to introduce Discussions!
Note, this feature is available for all paid plans on Pro and above, but not on-premise. Over the last few months, our team has been immersed in finding improved ways to collaborate during the API design process. We asked ourselves the following questions:
- How can our customers lower the amount of time and coordination needed to review and get approval/feedback from their respective teams?
- Is there an opportunity to resolve changes that can be made more quickly, so the respective stakeholders can obtain critical feedback on design decisions without having to context switch between applications?
- Can decision-makers review documentation in the design process and ask questions about how APIs meet their business needs?
As a result of the questions above, Discussions were formulated to assist in a collaborative way to enable collaboration with other workspace members on API design documents.
Promote ease and accessibility for your developers
Take the strain out of adding social add-ons such as real-time chat, annotations, and integrations with task managers. Discussions support your team’s workflow but get the added benefits of collaboration. Teammates can annotate, comment, mention others, and view Discussions from all projects.
Annotate
Use annotations when you want to add discussions to specific entities in a file. An image of the annotation and the state of the API file at the time of the annotation are saved so that collaborators can reference the annotation at any time. Annotation images are also sent in emails to @mentioned users.
Add comments
Use comments when your discussion applies to an entire file.
Mention Other Users
Use the at sign (@) to mention workspace users in a comment or annotation. Users receive an email at the primary address associated with their Stoplight account.
*Workspace access and role assignments impact mentions. See Mentions and User Access for details.
View Discussions from all users
Use the Inbox to see discussions for all projects you can edit. Each discussion shows the name of the project, the branch or version, and the name of the file that was discussed.
- Log in to your Workspace, and then edit a project.
- From the left pane, select an API file.
- Select the Form button, and then select Comment in the upper right corner.
- Select the Inbox icon. A number on the icon represents the number of unread messages.
If you got to the bottom of this, you are probably wondering if we have integrations lined up with this feature, and the answer is yes of course! Stoplight understands the importance of real-time collaboration tools that could help streamline the workflows and processes across your organization. Avoid emails, and spark in-product conversations with our Slack integration. If you are looking for task management, seamlessly integrate Asana, Linear, and Jira.
Integrate with Slack
Your team can now swiftly take action and increase productivity. With Slack, you’ll be able to:
- Mention users in your Slack workspace from a discussion in Stoplight.
- Share discussions with public channels in your Slack workspace.
- Receive and reply to messages sent from Stoplight within Slack.
- View discussions in Slack or Stoplight.
Discussions are synced between Slack and Stoplight. Each discussion includes a link to the project file where the discussion occurred. Screenshots are provided for annotations. Learn more about our Slack integration in our documentation here.
Task Integrations
“Businesses that engage in automated integration of tasks will record an increase in operational efficiency and revenue generation. This is because tasks and organizational processes will be carried out faster, and more work will be completed over the same period.”
Use discussions to integrate Stoplight with these task/issue management tools: Asana, Linear, and Jira.
Head to our roadmap to see what else we have in store in the coming months!
