Four goals of agile documentation
Documentation is a vast area. It can be done in lots of different mediums, describing many different aspects of software for various stakeholders. Here, we focus on how developers can use high-level documentation to communicate inside a team, and with direct stakeholders. All of these are things that can complement the documentation already provided by code, scripts, and tests. 1. Create a common understanding I often catch myself working under the assumption that everybody on the team has the same understanding of what we are doing. “Surely the view of the architecture in my head is clear to everybody?” That would imply we don’t have to write these seemingly obvious things down or have a sketch on the wall. This is a fallacy that, especially more tenured developers on the team are prone to. Architecture show-and-tell To verify how accurate our assumptions about common understanding really are, you need to get each team member ...