Pressing the Envelope and the Process Police
The process police, lead by Marilee, were on our tails because of our lightweight documentation approach and deviation from the waterfall-style milestones process. Just having Bud's "get out of jail free" card gave us some distance. But we did have to deal with breaking from the norms quite regularly.
At our first review meeting, we had completed a small handful of use cases. The design was simple, so writing the documentation was easy. It took only part of a day. Consequently, there wasn't much documentation. We had two reviewers, Jim and Art. Consider them the informants of the process police. They were not used to such thin documentation packages. Hey, come on! It covers only one month's work.
The fact that we had Bud's approval to push the status quo made all the difference. Our design decisions must have been good enough, because we spent most of the time discussing process and how we could get away with such thin documentation.
We gave a little more the next review, but they still wanted more. But no one could really say why. So, we settled on continuing to evolve our thin architecture document, well-refactored code, and comprehensive unit and acceptance tests.
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