Chapter 17. Is Oral Documentation Enough?
Reading is not the same as knowing.
Historically, in traditional software engineering teams, everything was written down and clearly documented, with all documentation being subject to reviews to ensure that it was complete and correct. In practice, on many projects what happens is that this design documentation is never really kept up to date, so most developers learn not to trust the documentation and prefer to read the source code. Unfortunately, the source code is typically written without much understanding of the overall design, so it is hard for maintenance programmers to really figure out the overall system from the code.
The XP focus on using the source code as the primary documentation for the ...
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