Documentation in an Agile Context
Many projects take documentation to one of its extreme forms. Either there is hardly any documentation at all and important knowledge is being lost. Or a great effort is spent on a large number of documents that are much too voluminous to be useful.
Agile methods tell us that there is only limited value in comprehensive documentation. Especially if documentation is used as an excuse for the lack of team communication it is in fact rather counter-productive.
Purposeful Documentation
It's a good idea to question the necessity of each individual document, and to produce only those document that have a purpose that can clearly be identified. This purpose can manifest itself for instance in a later project stage or in a follow-up project. It's important to understand that team discussion and documentation complement each other, but shouldn't be thought of as alternatives. Moreover, the usefulness of documentation depends on its form. Documentation that is concise and well-structured offers a high readability and makes information easily accessible.
I offer to support projects and organisations with the development and implementation of strategies towards purposeful documentation. Please also note the seminars on "Agile Documentation" (in German language) that I run on behalf of Deutsche Informatik-Akademie (DIA).
Book
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Based on many real-world projects, I wrote a book that comprises 50 patterns on how to obtain good documentation in a software project: Agile Documentation — The book is published by John Wiley & Sons (2003). The table of contents is: 1. Finding the right topics 2. Structuring individual documents 3. Layout and typography 4. Infrastructure and technical organisation 5. Management and quality assurance |
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Copyright Andreas Rüping, 2009. I cannot accept responsibility for materials on other web sites to which external links from my web site may point. The owners of those sites hold the sole responsibility for their content.
Imprint: Dr. Andreas Rüping, Sodenkamp 21 A, 22337 Hamburg, Germany, Tax Id 26/225/34412 (Tax office Hamburg-Nord)