6 Reasons Agile Teams Should Care About Documentation

How has agile software development changed the course of technical documentation? Why should agile developers care about documentation? Here we shall discuss a few aspects of agile software development.

The software development processes have changed a lot in recent years, especially after the advent of agile development. Waterfall (traditional) development has slowly made way for agile development, offering significant business agility to meet customers' ever-changing needs.

There is much more collaboration between the team of developers while creating documentation during each phase of software development. Software developers and technical writers work together to incorporate the changes quickly.

In this article, we will discuss why agile software developers should consider the importance of documentation. Read on!

Significance of Documentation in Agile Software Development

To improve customer experience, agile documentation helps developers offer business agility and ensure collaboration. It provides the software development team with the basis for learning, adapting, innovating, and delivering value to customers. In agile software development solutions, documentation happens with every software release. Without agile documentation, there are chances of miscommunication and error.?

Reasons Why You Should Use Agile Documentation

To tackle the shortcomings of Waterfall documentation, agile documentation came into being. In waterfall development, documentation typically happens at the project's final phase, along with quality assurance and testing. At this stage, developers will start working on new projects, and it’s hard to go through the old projects again. On the other hand, in agile software development, documentation happens along with each phase of the project.

Relying on agile documentation resolves the above issues. More importantly, it helps with writing error-free code every time. Let’s see the major reasons development teams should focus on agile documentation.?

1. Minimise Work Volume?

Implementing documentation along with development allows the development team to continue to work in a flow by collaborating seamlessly. Indeed, both writers and developers can interact, learn and innovate under such circumstances making the entire process more productive and fruitful. For instance, if technical writers have doubts, they can directly collaborate with the development team to give information about it immediately. Both teams can save time, and the workload also reduces. The agile approach to documentation focuses on providing the most essential and relevant information only.

2. Meet Deadlines?

Technical writers can work through the project from the start to the end. The process is referred to as continuous documentation. The documentation team writes the material from scratch, and continuous documentation allows for writing reviews and delivering a large volume of documents on time. However, it’s also true that documenting a product in the development process is hard. Over a period, there are chances that the development team may omit the attributes. Therefore, the only remedy is to delete the material and apply version control if there is a need for code reuse in the future.

3. Enhance Product Attributes?

Getting documentation in the early stages of software development is the ideal way to receive feedback on development. It helps prioritise the most important tasks while identifying and eliminating unnecessary tasks. If there is any clarification required documentation team can directly approach the developers rather than using written artifacts that describe the function of the software.

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4. Find Bugs?

Get the help of your documentation team in the sprint to help the quality assurance and testing team to track down bugs and issues. For example, verifying the functionalities work properly and documentation during the development phase allows discovering bugs. It also ensures the development team can fix the bug issues during the sprint. Also, there are several bug-tracking systems for identifying bugs. Unlike traditional waterfall development, it is easy to pinpoint bugs and issues in the agile approach to documentation.

5. Enhanced Collaboration?

In continuous documentation, a shared documentation management system allows teams to access, update and work together on documentation anytime, anywhere. It further ensures that each team member has access to up-to-date information. Continuous documentation focuses on creating easy-to-handle documentation that is most useful for developers. Indeed, the agile approach to documentation is accurate and up-to-date compared to traditional waterfall software development.

6. Highly Flexible?

Agile documentation is lightweight and emphasizes the unique requirements of a project. It helps teams focus on providing value in the first place, adding to its flexibility. You can create and update agile documentation in real time and make the necessary changes. Therefore, the agile documentation is always up-to-date and incorporates all the changes as and when it is happening.

Summary?

Overall, the agile document management system streamlines project documentation, establishes collaboration and promotes interactions among team members. Having the right type of documentation is essential in both waterfall projects and agile development strategies. Embracing agile documentation brings several benefits to the software development team. It serves as the foundation for planning, decision making and information sharing. There is enough scope for improvement during the entire project life cycle in the agile approach to documentation. The Agile document management system eliminates unnecessary processes that do not add value to the project. Therefore, if you implement it correctly, agile document methodology assists the project team and helps them focus on the deliverables.