A while ago the company I work for had outsourced a development project to a third party. They employed agile practices in developing the solution. However when asked for documentation they would just say it was required as it was incorporated in a wiki or as part of their sprints.
They did leave at the completion of the project, with all but one of the project team. The project wiki site has now been closed down once the yearly subscription was due.
When they left they took most of the knowledge and understanding of what was developed with them.
So I do have 2 main questions;
- Is this normal for agile or just an excuse for not wanting to write it?
- What are the industry norm for documentation in agile projects to record development
requirements, designs, key decisions and context?
Best Answer
My theory is that it's why agile spread so fast, especially scrum. I've seen too many team wanting agile to protect themselves (instead of the whole company). The problem is that in many case, the methodology is used against them by management (because they want to protect themselves too!).
Does this means agile doesn't work at all? Of course not, this just means that agile helps you to solve few common problems, but you are still in charge of all the others. And in many case agile is just not suitable for that team in that company.
To be short:
The team should define how much documentation they need
They know the domain, they are the experts and more importantly they build the thing!
That's what Working software over comprehensive documentation in the Agile Manifesto means.