1. Problem

Analytics documentation goes stale fast when it depends on manual rebuilds. The actual challenge is not generating docs once. It is making documentation updates part of the delivery path so people trust what they read.

2. Approach

The workflow paired DBT-generated docs with a Jenkins job that rebuilt and published them on every meaningful change. That turned documentation from an afterthought into a routine output of the analytics stack.

  • Generate docs from the transformation layer, not from hand-maintained wiki pages.
  • Publish automatically so the latest state is always available.
  • Treat documentation hosting as part of CI, not a separate manual task.

3. Evidence

Automated documentation process
The value came from removing the manual handoff between modeling changes and published documentation.

4. Outcome

The analytics team got documentation that stayed aligned with the actual transformation layer, and stakeholders stopped relying on stale copies or tribal knowledge for core metric definitions.

5. Tech stack

  • DBT docs generation
  • Jenkins for scheduled and push-based rebuilds
  • A static hosting target for published docs output

6. Useful links

7. Related reading

8. Call to action

If your documentation still depends on somebody remembering to update it by hand, I can help wire it into the build path so it stays live.