2006-11-14
documentation ... what is it good for ?? absolutely nothing.. say it again...
I was at a conference yesterday, and one of the speakers was complaining about how the documentation his company produced was useless after it was written.
I'm not going to debate this, I've never been a fan of large wads of paper.
but while he was talking I thought of another use of documentation. It isn't the document itself that is important, but the act of creating it. (so sorry agile guys.. I still believe documentation is important and needs to be written).
If your document template is good, it should be asking you probing questions, and force you to think about what your trying to achieve. Be it a business plan, a architecture document, or a test plan.
The act of reading the different sections, talking to people about them, and putting those thoughts to paper is 90% of what the document is about, not that the documentation will be read of used by other people after this process has finished.
The important consequence of this thought involves who you get to participate in the document creation. You need to involve the people who traditionally were the recipients (the people on the other side of the wall catching the thing you threw over) of the document in the creation of it.
When it comes time to actually implementing the document, they use it to remind themselves of the conversations and thinking they had when they wrote it. The other benefit will be grounding those founders/architects/ivory tower people with some reality.