Myths of Agile — 1

Agile has been around for long time now and yesterday I heard one of the most misused point of below manifesto in one of the meetings. This particular myth or misunderstanding has troubled me over the years. So I thought may be I will share my thoughts..

Below is the agile manifesto:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

This is the first thing anyone learns when they start learning about agile. According to my understanding I believe the second point in manifesto is misunderstood to mean that agile project do not require any documentation.

Documentation seems to be the most hated or thought as unimportant activity for a project. If you ask someone to do documentation especially to a developer they will generally ignore it or will try to do bare minimum which may or may not be useful.

Over the years I have seen project completely skipping documentation giving the reason that agile does not require documentation according to its manifesto.

But is it true that agile says no documentation? I don’t think so. Manifesto says “Working Software OVER Comprehensive documentation. “

Note the words in bold. It does not say working software instead of documentation.

What type of minimum documentation a project generally requires?

1. Requirements documentation
2. Design documentation (High Level, Low level etc.)
3. Operations manual

Why is documentation so hated and avoided?

1. It’s thought to be waste of time.
2. Assumption that no one ever reads the documentation
3. It is to be done by someone else as there are other important tasks to be done

Initially I was also against documentation, even to writing comments in my code. I thought I write such a great code anyone reading will understand.

But over the years my view has changed. Sometimes I had to join an agile project once it is already in development for sometime or I had to work on support and maintenance of live projects that have been delivered with agile. At the point of joining most of original team had been replaced with new team as transitions keep happening.

At such points in projects it was most difficult to understand the anything about the project. Because no documentation available and no people available to explain. It extended the time required for gaining knowledge of project. And same cycle will be repeated. This is a loss of time and efforts basically useless efforts which could have been avoided if the documentation was maintained from the start.

I have also now worked on project which are especially targeting documentation of the project to be done retrospectively. The “no documentation” is causing them to spend money and efforts on activities that should have been part of initial project as well. And to create a retrospective documentation is even more harder than if it had been originally done.

If documentation is made part of agile discipline then it will provide many benefits. Whether the documentation to be comprehensive or not should part of decision making depending on type and context of the project and situation.

Absolutely there should be minimum required documentation for each project. The point about documentation in agile manifesto should not be used as excuse to avoid documentation completely. Remember its “Working software over comprehensive documentation” and it is not “Working software instead of comprehensive documentation”.