Documents In Agile: How Much And When To Write?

< p > agile aims to minimize waste, so extreme logic is adopted. All documents are wasteful.

This does not mean that documents can (or should) be completely abandoned.

Documentation is useful for a team (especially when a team wants to expand its scale).

But the declaration suggests that reducing documentation is a good thing, and designers should seek to use the smallest amount of documents to communicate design decisions.

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< p > < strong > Jonathan provides the following suggestions as to how to minimize < a href= "//www.sjfzxm.com/news/index_c.asp > < /a >: < /strong > /p >

< p > 1) popularize the idea of "fewer things will be better" in your team.

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(P > 2) always ponder the question: what are the minimum deliveries that we need to deliver immediately? < /p >

< p > Ashish Sharma mentioned in the article "the essence, value and timely document of agile", how to balance between document and discussion: < /p >

< p > agile target should be an appropriate balance between document and discussion.

Documents are an important part of every system.

Regardless of whether agile or other methods are adopted, a comprehensive document does not guarantee the success of the project.

In fact, it will increase the chance of failure.

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< p > he mentioned that when considering how many documents to write and when to write, you can refer to the following three criteria: < /p >

< p > essential: documents should be sufficient but detailed.

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< p > valuable: the document needed for compiling the text, rather than the document we want to write.

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< p > timely: the document should be written when we need it and in the way we do it (JIT).

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< p > Michael Nygard describes the view of document related processes.

He suggests thinking about the process from the beginning, considering the result: < /p >

< p > I often find that many processes do not have consumers.

This is pure waste. Seemingly no one uses the output, but the person in charge of the process is not aware of it at all.

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< p > Michael suggests that processes, including their inputs and outputs, can be described from the perspective of consumers.

He shared the following questions to help describe: < /p >

< p > who is the ultimate consumer? < /p >

< p > what is their demand? < /p >

< p > How do you deliver them to them? < /p >

< p > How do you know how they are prepared? < /p >

< p > How do you produce? < /p >

< p > what kind of input do you need to produce products? < /p >

< p > Tom de Lancey, which was launched in LinkedIn in early 2013, is an important document on the urgent document: agile and waterfall model: "/p >

< p > many people are uncomfortable with giving up the documents they are familiar with frequently used: < a href= "//www.sjfzxm.com/news/index_c.asp" > system requirements < /a >, system design, vision and scope, use case, mode, workflow flowchart, Rational unified Cheng Wen file, etc.

Many people can't split these documents into five sentences.

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< p > he described an analysis method called "emergency documents" for writing documents: < /p >

< p > (...

We will not waste time and energy in writing documents that we have never discovered how to do.

We document when we find the problem.

We write the actual documents we need, not the documents we want to write.

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One of the advantages of < p > < strong > TOM < a href= "//www.sjfzxm.com/news/index_c.asp > > emergency document < /a > is: < /strong > /p >

< p > documents become part of the development process, not individual activities.

Because documents are actually very useful, the whole team is interested in maintaining it.

Each user story has a separate task to update WIKI (using a SharePoint website that connects each user story).

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< p > Mario Moreira wrote a blog about the scale of the normal document of the agile world.

As Mario said, adjusting the scale appropriately is a response to software projects that have had a large number of documents in the past or present: < /p >

The normal size of a p > document means that the effort to write and maintain the document is added to the value of the document itself, and a better return on investment, < /p > should be achieved without the document (such as reorganizing the input of information and the impact of no document on the current decision).

< p > his blog provides suggestions on the scale of normal documents.

Some of his recommendations are as follows: < /p >

< p > documents should be of a cooperative nature.

It should not be written solely by one person, but should be shared with others.

Sharing should be made at the drafting stage to get enough information.

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< p > attention is only enough for good documents and avoid too much early details, because that means a lot of guesswork and a waste of time.

Just being good enough means writing documents only for what is currently known.

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< p > documents should exist in many forms.

It is not only a document in Word format, but also exists in Wiki, annotation or other existing in agile tools or code.

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