Does Agile development support system documentation and are there challenges trying to transition coding to new development teams?
Declan Whelan: Agile practices do not address this directly and suggest doing the minimum documentation that you can. In lean terms, system documentation is considered “waste” but in some cases it may be necessary waste. The intent here is focus attention on high quality code rather than documenting poor quality code. So, if the team has bandwidth there is higher value in improving code etc. rather than writing detailed design documents. This is because the cleaner code base makes transitions much better. Great documentation on crappy code helps but not very much in the long run. However, I do recommend having some minimum high level architecture documentation that serves as a guide for new development. And teams should decide what documentation artifacts they feel are important to help them deliver new software. If the team is co-located this could be as simple as taking snapshots of whiteboards and archiving them. For documentation work I suggest you ask “Who is going to read this?”
Related Questions
- Does Agile development support system documentation and are there challenges trying to transition coding to new development teams?
- How detailed do our requirements need to be to support a request for system design and development/procurement?
- How many employees are dedicated to support, implementation, and development of the proposed system?
