Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Agility

One set of problems I have often seen with “the Waterfall” are the Communications Problems, particularly the over-reliance on communication by documents. 

Communication-By-Documentation (CBD) – What’s so bad about that?

It seems so correct and natural to use documents to capture and communicate all the details of what we are working on that it is almost unthinkable to question this practice.  But I am going to try.

The sort of documentation I am discussing here are requirement docs, graphs, ER diagrams, models of all sorts, analysis docs, architectural diagrams, and etc.  (There is a lot of etc., by the way. )  I am not saying that documentation is not needed, or that it is not useful, it is just that we have to be careful to protect our project from the problems that these documents bring with them.  [NOTE: I am NOT talking about user documentation – things like help docs, instruction manuals, support group FAQ’s… these things are part of what the user expects as part of the project]

Here is a short list of some of the problems of communication-by-documentation I’d like to cover:

• No way to test for correctness or completeness
• Its “Lossy” – the most important and valuable information remains in the brain of the author
• Becomes outdated quickly and is often not kept up to date
• No easy way to discover stuff not thought about
• Especially hard to do in a high pressure, strict deadline situation
• Wasteful repetition from phase-to-phase
• Lots of other opportunities for waste
• Suffers from the “telephone game” syndrome – information gets garbled as it is passed along.
• Documents are essentially “one-way” devices
• CBD causes lengthy feedback loops
• In some cases, changes and corrections are difficult or impossible to inject

There are many more, but I think these will get the discussion started.  As time goes by, perhaps I’ll add more to the list.  As I flesh out the details of each of these in separate posts I’ll turn the list into links. 

If you have any thoughts about other communication problems with Waterfall, please let me know and I’ll add them to the list.