Writing Crystallizes The Thought

Agile Teams often hold the belief that we should not write anything down because that's waste. From a human perspective though we need to write things down because that's the mechanism that allows us, or maybe even forces us, to think things through.

Even the Romans knew that "verba volant, scripta manent," meaning "the spoken words fly away, written words remain." So maybe the real question is not "Should we write anything down?" but rather "How much should we write down?" The face-to-face interaction should be followed up with the creation of an artifact that captures what the conversation clarified. This will serve as the basis for further decisions or conversations, or maybe assists in the reexamination of this decision when more data becomes available. Interspersing face-to-face conversations with written thoughts firms up ideas and speeds up the road to shared understanding and clarity.

Usually at this point somebody will jump in to say that all that writing is taking time and that writing a 100-page requirement or design document is a waste. Yes, 100 pages might be a waste most of the time. I think that the artifact produced should be a piece of focused and processed information. If it is 100 pages then it should be indeed a very complex issue, or somebody hasn't done enough thinking about this. But I'll leave this topic for another day.

This belief in writing things down was confirmed a few weeks ago as I talked to a new co-worker, Steve Feldman, who writes the Seven Seconds blog. He mentioned that he routinely asks his dev teams to blog about their work. The part of the work that is general in nature can be blogged on their outside blogs, while the company and product specific work should be blogged on the inside blogs. The act of writing things down externalizes the person's thinking and opens up the ideas for a conversation with the rest of the team.

The blog entry with one's thoughts will generate further conversation, both online and face-to-face. Each conversation should bring the team closer to identifying and solving the problem that they have set out solve.