Case Study: Sonar cuts documentation cycle time by more than a third with GitBook
Key results
The challenge
Sonar is an automated code review and verification platform serving developers, tech leads, and system administrators across multiple products and 19+ version-specific documentation sets. Its previous documentation platform was built for marketing content, so every table, anchor link, and component required manual configuration. Because changes needed heavy developer involvement, the documentation became a bottleneck.
The solution
Sonar migrated to GitBook, using its bidirectional GitHub Sync so engineers could contribute directly through GitHub while technical writers used GitBook's editor, with content kept in sync. The team migrated content quickly between late July and September 2025 and then progressively enhanced it.
“Honestly, we probably spent more time on the formatting of documents than we would actually writing.”
CBCynthia BetheaLead Software Technical Writer, Sonar
The results, in context
Comparing post-migration sprints to pre-migration work in Jira, Sonar's median cycle time for in-progress tickets dropped from 29 hours to just over 19 hours, and average cycle time fell from 8 days to 5.63 days — a 35% improvement. Small fixes that once piled up in the backlog now get handled immediately.