Working software over comprehensive documentation

Are you overwhelmed by documentation? Do you spend more time doing administrative work than work that actually creates value? It is time for a change. This article will discuss the second value of Agile Manifesto, working software over comprehensive documentation.

In my previous job, I spend more time doing paperwork compared to work that really creates value. My boss and seniors told me that this paperwork was necessary to prevent me from getting into trouble. I was obedient, I did the necessary paperwork and indeed it saved me from much trouble. However, I absolutely dreaded doing that paperwork. Looking back, much of my actual work was sub-standard because too much attention was given to administrative tasks. Over-documentation will also force employees to cut corners in their actual work as everyone's time and attention are finite. Therefore, the majority of effort should be focused on developing working software rather than documentation.

One important question is how much documentation is just nice? From personal experience, I will document the project requirements and the purpose of each requirement. I will also keep track of the steps I took to build each requirement to make future changes easier. That's basically all I document. For example, in a data analytics project, the requirements might be to see market share data, demographic data, or yearly trends. I will document these requirements and the purpose, for instance, the market share data is to see how well my product is selling compared to other brands. Probably, I will build a bar chart and I will record down the steps I took to build the bar chart. For example, I have dropped the null cells and aggregated some values. Most of my documentation is in the actual product itself, I try to avoid creating too many notebooks.

A general rule of thumb for documentation is that the document must tell you what, why, and how you created a product. More than 90% of your attention should be on product building. I have seen colleagues that create very beautiful documents but nobody reads them. The effort spent on documentation could be better used in optimizing the product.

Focus your efforts on developing workable products, everything else is just a distraction. Follow me if you are interested in Agile.