Pragmatic Thinking and Learning

Harness the Real Power of Documenting

One of the tenets of agile software development is to avoid needless documentation. That is, if documentation doesn’t provide value, don’t do it: writing documentation for documentation’s sake is a waste of time.

That’s because it is common to waste a lot of time preparing low-level, detailed design documents that become obsolete almost immediately. Worse, these sorts of documents generally have no audience—they aren’t serving any useful purpose, other than fulfilling a checkbox to prove that the team “produced documentation.” Because it’s such a wasteful practice, agile teams take a hard look at any documentation they are required to produce to ensure that there’s a genuine need for it.

Many people ...