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] |
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
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.