Category: overhead

Lightweight methods

January 16, 2007 by Artem

Agile software development methods tend to be lightweight. That is, while agile project can produce extensive user documentation, there is usually very small amount of internal documentation and bureaucracy. There is almost never any heavy architecture and design specification and even if there is, it is never produced upfront, but rather evolves iteratively.

Teams don't just skip the boring documentation. There are reasons for using a lightweight process:

• Agile teams focus on adding value for the end customer.
  While customers might find a user guide useful, in most of cases they don't care about the internal design documents. Therefore if it is possible to work without the heavy upfront documentation, it actually saves some customer money.