Slide 12 of 17
Notes:
Mark Paulk comments, “The lack of design documentation would be a concern in many environments, such as hard real-time systems, large systems, or virtual teams. In such environments, good designs are crucial to success, and the refactoring strategy would be high risk.”
Merriam-Webster's gives the following definition for the noun document:
1 something that serves as evidence or proof
2 a writing conveying information
XP asserts that programmers don’t like to write documents and emphasizes face-to-face communication over written communication. “You may ask how we later know what the design is, since the cards are gone. Our answer is that the design is represented in the code.” The code only interpretable by those skilled in the art of programming does not mitigate all the risk. Both definitions of document must be taken into account when discussing documentation. Oral communication may take less time in providing an understanding of information initially but written communication takes less time to preserve this understanding. One can also argue that written communication can preserve the information with less risk than would be incurred with oral communication. “One common engineering concept is that word of mouth is a very poor way to maintain precision and consistency.” Even the XP process recognizes that sometimes things need to be written down. In legal proceedings, written evidence is taken as authoritative over verbal evidence. XP emphasizes letting the customer decide what documentation needs to be written down by requesting the documentation as a feature of the system. This one sided emphasis leaves an organization at risk that information it may have needed to preserve was not done so and may be lost due to employee entropy.
