Test-Driven Java Development - Second Edition

Documentation

In many of the organizations that we worked with, the documentation was created for the wrong reasons. The management tends to think that documentation is somehow related to project success—that without a lot of (often short-lived) documentation, the project will fail. Thus, we are asked to spend a lot of time planning, answering questions, and filling in questionnaires that are often designed not to help the project but to provide an illusion that everything is under control. Someone's existence is often justified with documentation (the result of my work is this document). It also serves as a reassurance that everything is going as planned (there is an Excel sheet that states that we are on schedule). However, by far the most ...