Insight
No documentation needed!
The Agile Manifesto prioritises working software over comprehensive documentation. Teams frequently read this as permission to stop documenting entirely. That reading is wrong — and expensive.
The Manifesto does not say documentation has no value. It says working software has more value than comprehensive documentation. The word "comprehensive" is doing a lot of work there. Exhaustive documentation of everything, just in case — that's what the Manifesto was reacting against. Strategic documentation of the things that actually matter is something different.
Three problems compound quickly
Three problems compound quickly when documentation is neglected. First, knowledge gaps: when everything lives in senior developers' heads, onboarding becomes painful and attrition becomes catastrophic. Second, maintenance burden: undocumented systems accumulate technical debt rapidly, and the cost of understanding the codebase grows with every sprint. Third, communication failures: without shared working agreements and documented goals, teams lose alignment — the cycling peloton starts looking like chickens in a pen.
Minimum viable documentation
The practical response is to define "minimum viable documentation" as part of your Definition of Done. Not everything needs documenting. Decide what does — centrally, with the right tooling, maintained actively — and treat that decision as a team agreement rather than an afterthought.
Documentation, done strategically, is grease in the delivery process. It removes friction. A new engineer who can onboard without blocking a senior for two weeks is a delivery win. A codebase that can be understood without tribal knowledge is a resilience win. That is entirely consistent with being agile — it is, in fact, what agile actually asks for.
Something in here resonate?
If knowledge lives in a few people's heads and onboarding hurts, that's a fixable design problem.
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