How much documentation is optimal for an Agile project?

Question

I recently joined a new project utilizing Agile methodology. The documentation is scarce to none, except for sticky papers on the whiteboard indicating stories, completed, in-progress, etc. The project is a web app for a workflow that is fairly complicated. Is this common or is it still useful to have functional/tech specs, etc. with Agile? What is the optimal amount of documentation for a fairly complex Agile web project?

Answer 1

Enough that it's clear. It's tid to the complexity of what's being built for me.

I'm excited about using balsamiq in my next project to see what I can do away with.

Answer 2

As little as your team and client is comfortable with.

• Agile Documentation Best Practices

• Agile Documentation

• Agile Documentation Strategies (Dr. Dobbs)

Answer 3

One of the tenets of most agile frameworks is to keep your technical debt in check by constant improvement and refactoring. This process results in highly readable and maintainable code. Thus you generally don't need much documentation; you can read the code. If this isn't the case on your project then you might consider that your engineering practices are in need of fixing rather than more documentation. Although a certain amount of high level docs are useful,and possibly necessary depending on the system; the general feeling should be that docs = waste.

Answer 4

We use Scrum along with Agile. Although the amount of documentation we generate is not much.. we tend to include the documentation in the code itself. Or documentation can itself be classified into a subtask and have an associated burn down chart.