Knowledge Base / Why Scrum? / Waste reduction
Use only necessary and sufficient artifacts
Tools can be useful, but only to the point where they begin to generate waste. Those used to support work management and product development should fulfill their role without adding bureaucracy to the work. Generally speaking, the simplest tools that work generate the best results.
Tools used by teams to draft, plan and monitor their product development work are better represented in physical media than virtual media. Whiteboards on the wall are good examples of media for these tools. They function as information radiators, imposing a transparency that is not possible, for example, when using software tools. Of course, software can be useful and offer various facilities. But when misused, they end up imposing a way of working that is often wrong. By creating more obstacles than actually facilitating the work, they can generate quite costly waste.
Documents that reflect plans, schematics and specifications can also be useful in supporting the management of and the work itself. The team, however, should focus on creating and maintaining only what will actually be used. Producing documentation that is more than sufficient is wasteful.
Excessive documentation shifts the focus and decreases usability from what is really needed, which we can consider to be even greater waste.
Discussion: How much documentation should we produce?
Producing documentation that is more than sufficient is wasteful. It is not uncommon to be required to generate a large volume of documents in product development. The most common pretexts for this type of obligation include: the need to facilitate future maintenance, ensure the delivery of what was agreed upon and compliance with some standard or some legal requirement. In many cases, however, this document generation work is as large as or even larger than the actual work of building the product. And in reality, at best only a small part of this documentation is really needed. In this way, a large amount of waste is generated.
In software development, we are rarely able to effectively use written documentation to maintain a product in the future. In practice, this documentation is extensive and difficult to keep up to date. Good coding practices and their own automated tests constitute sufficient and necessary documentation for product maintenance.
As for ensuring delivery of what was agreed on, the use of documentation is replaced by a closer relationship with customers, built through Scrum’s own dynamics. The short cycles of the Scrum framework generate – for customers and other stakeholders – frequent opportunities to interact with the team to directly influence the product under development based on their feedback regarding what has already been produced, fostering the creation of an environment of trust.
As for standards and legal requirements, I can say from experience that these can always be challenged, both in terms of their form and their need as a whole. In other words, I recommend always seeking to reduce and eliminate what is possible. We should generate only the documentation that is really necessary.