Case Study: Portable saves weeks with Userdoc

Portable, an award-winning Australian software agency, took on a web-based rebuild for a government client. The brief sounded simple: replace a public-facing service that sat atop two generations of legacy code. In reality, the original system hid years of undocumented tweaks, constraints and edge cases - exactly the type of detail that only surfaces when it is too late.

The silent risk

"Missing a single business rule could sink the timeline. We had multiple projects running in parallel, so rework wasn't an option." — Faiq Gazdhar, Technology Lead at Portable

The client's requirements were a high-level 30-page PDF, assuming deep familiarity with the business domain. Converting that into clear user stories, acceptance criteria, and test cases would normally cost one analyst more than two full weeks, before revisions and approvals even began.

Enter Userdoc

Portable ditched the blank-page approach. Instead, they uploaded the PDF to Userdoc, let the platform parse every paragraph and watched it surface:

1. Concise user stories for every feature
2. Detailed acceptance criteria describing exactly what needs to happen
3. Clear feature relationships, showing how each feature feeds into the next
4. AI-generated test cases, ready for QA sign-off

Total time: about two hours.

Faiq recalls the experience as "Eye-opening", with "so many small details captured that could have otherwise been missed".

From source of pain to single source of truth

But Userdoc didn't just accelerate day one, as soon enough the client team was inside the platform, adjusting the requirements and asking questions in plain English using Userdoc's "chat to requirements" feature. Questions that once meant a meeting were answered on the spot.

Structure beats sprawl

A powerful feature of Userdoc is the ability to link requirements together and create a clear, navigable structure out of what would otherwise be stand-alone requirements.

"One great thing about Userdoc is that features are linked, so you can see how features are related to each other, how these user stories flow on to these others etc. In tools like Jira or Azure, unless your Business Analyst has managed to link stories by hand, they don't help you visualise how the software features flow together" — Faiq Gazdhar

Portable also discovered the hidden power of Userdoc's gentle limits: limits on certain fields force the writers to focus on specifics. No more 1000-word epics drifting into solution design.

Measurable impact

❌ Without Userdoc	✅ With Userdoc
~10 working days to capture initial stories	~20 minutes to generate the first pass
An extra week for refinements and approvals	1-2 hours of AI-assisted polishing
Increased rework due to miscommunications and missing requirements	Clear, test-ready specs caught issues upfront, cutting rework to near zero
Specs scattered across docs, email and Jira	A single source of truth that both Portable and their customer can trust

The results

As a leading software development agency, Portable isn't only looking to increase internal efficiencies, but also how they can provide more value to their own customers - and their customers' customers - while ensuring everyone can be involved in the process.

"Userdoc has helped develop requirements for really complex software in a matter of hours, and brought our clients along the journey - and helped us deliver value to them and their customers" — Faiq Gazdhar

For Portable, Userdoc turned a time-critical, high-risk specification phase into a rapid, collaborative exercise - saving weeks, protecting budget and giving both agency and client a shared language from day one.