Chapter 7: Oral Documentation (Oxymoronic, or Just Plain Moronic?)


Overview

Talkin About Documentation

(Sing to the tune of My Generation by The Who)

We don t need to write it down
Talkin bout documentation

Cause we switch our pairs around
Talkin bout documentation

We are always feelin fine
We don t do documentation
Don t document and don t design
We don t do documentation

Cowboy coders come on in
We don t do documentation!
We re always coding with a grin
We don t do documentation!

It s the latest agile sensation . . .
Just write code, skip documentation

No documentation
No documentation, baby

GROUCHO  

XPers are not afraid of oral documentation. [1]
”Robert C. Martin

start sidebar
VoXP

I felt that it seriously impacted my ability to quickly come up to speed on the project when I joined them. There were literally no documents or diagrams that I could look at to understand the implementation at a high level. I was immediately pointed to the code . . . [2]
”Timothy Fisher

end sidebar
 

Documentation in XP is one of its more controversial subjects. XPers claim repeatedly that they actually create lots of documentation; perplexed observers notice that most of this documentation is either source code, is written on informal (often physical) media such as pieces of cardboard, or is based in an organic project Wiki that evolves along with the architecture.

For this reason, the arguments regarding documentation in XP tend to be paradoxical and confusing. Our favorite retort, though, is that XP has documentation in the form of spoken conversations.

[1] Mark Collins-Cope, Interview with Robert C. Martin, ObjectiveView ( http://www.ratio.co.uk/ov4.pdf), p. 36.

[2] See the Voice of eXPerience: Oral Documentation sidebar later in this chapter.




Extreme Programming Refactored
Extreme Programming Refactored: The Case Against XP
ISBN: 1590590961
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 156

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