I have been as guilty as the next geek of rationalising my distaste at the tedium of documentation. Many of my agile friends and colleagues are fond of saying that 'Documentation is Not Understanding' when promoting the 'people over process' bit of the Agile Manifesto. Now while I do indeed hold this truth to be self-evident, a few recent experiences find me not so dismissive of the value of documentation as once I was.
Circumstances led me to leave my role in a nice fun agile project for a few months. When I returned, I struggled to get back up to speed for a couple of weeks - these agile folks will just go and change things while you're not looking :) When trying to reconstruct my mental model of the project, I found the pieces I had to put together out of conversations with analysts, customers and developers didn't always fit together snugly, and I found myself needing some sort of point of reference that was indeed shared understanding to work forward from. Anyway, I haven't really worked out what this means, but I have to conclude that while documentation is not understanding, neither is conversation. Another assumption bites the dust!
Perhaps the conclusion should be Understanding is Understanding...
ReplyDeleteSuppose every developer had a blog or a shared wiki for rutinary, non-trivial comments and remarks about the project... without sacrifying code clarity (it isn't formal documentation).
ReplyDeleteWith this sort of informal collaborative documentation system where people still are over process... Could your experience have been better?
Ricardo,
ReplyDeleteWe do run a wiki and it works very well. What I found I was missing was the 'why' behind what the team was doing. I had lots about 'what' the team was doing, but struggled to get a coherent message on the why, even from a group of folks who had been colocated the whole time. I have since gotten back up to speed, but am still made wary by this experience!