Succeeding with Agile

Learn to Start Without a Specification

Because a Scrum team shifts its focus from writing requirements to talking about them and then progressively refines those requirements over the course of the project, the team is left without the comfort of starting with a traditional specification document. Many groups—quality assurance and technical writing foremost among them—will find this very disconcerting. Part of transitioning to Scrum and achieving long-term success with it will be learning how to comfortably get started on a project without a “complete” specification document.

First, I should be clear that the goal is not to throw out what may be a useful document. What we want instead is to use a specification document appropriately. Apart ...