Necessary and neglected?: an empirical study of internal documentation in agile software development teams

  • Authors:

  • Christoph Johann Stettina;Werner Heijstek

  • Affiliations:

  • Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands;Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 29th ACM international conference on Design of communication
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

When compared to traditional development methods, agile development practices are associated with more direct communication and less documentation. However, few empirical studies exist that investigate the role of documentation in agile development teams. We thus employed a questionnaire to measure the perceptions of a group of agile practitioners with regard to the documentation in their projects. We obtained responses from 79 agile software development professionals and 8 teams in 13 different countries. Our findings include that over half of developers in our data set find documentation important or even very important but that too little documentation is available in their projects. Agile practitioners do not seem to agree with the agile principle that "The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation." We were able to validate this result for a set of dissimilar agile teams in various domains.