When working on a project using agile development, remembering to correctly document the necessary project information is extremely important to the project’s development(Essential honestly) and should be easy to write up if incremental work is being done by the Scrum team. The team should be concentrated on working on the software as a main priority, and after finishing any important development or research concentrate on documenting the necessary information. Most the scrum team’s main effort should be put into the development of the software as the agile manifesto states,
“Working software over comprehensive documentation”
When working in an agile environment documents are worked on in a team as a collaborative effort. The documents are not written by one person beforehand or after the project is done, but continuously through the project's development by the whole team. This ensures that all of the scrum team can look over what the documents say when contributing to ensure the documentation is correct, and get informed about any information if anyone might have missed out.
The Documentation is extremely important to the product owner and scrum leader, for they will most likely be the ones reading it in the end, if at all. The information in documentation can change as the software itself changes, “If documentation is adaptive and if the documentation supports people collaboration rather than replacing it, then documentation can be well aligned with agile development principles,” (Rubin & Rubin, 2011). When writing agile documentation be sure to use agile vocabulary so that it is easier to describe what agile development techniques are being used.
Documentation should be short and exact with what is written by putting only what is necessary from the research and development of the project, complete dates/times for what is being done or has been done, and any helpful images. The agile documentation necessary in development to help whoever is reading said documentation to be able to understand what the project is about, who the project is developed for, what the software is being developed to do, what the scrum team has been doing so far in the development, and what they plan to do on further development if not finished.When working on any agile project, especially bigger and more adverse softwares it is important to remember with, “the complexity of modern software systems and the cryptic nature of current programming languages, good design documentation is not only useful but vital” (Selic 2009).
