Succeeding with Agile

Cross-Functional Teams Reduce Documentation Needs

A common objection to getting rid of or reducing the scope of specification documents is that these documents are the only way some groups learn what is expected of the system. A QA group, for example, may reason that without a specification document it will not know which behavior is expected and which is buggy. In an organization’s pre-Scrum days this would likely have been true. The programmers may have met on their own, made decisions, and then relayed the decisions to the testers through specification documents. After years of exposure to working this way, it would be fair for testers to assert that without the specifications they won’t know what to test.

On a Scrum project, however, the ...