Creating documentation practices for agile software development organizations : a qualitative case study

Abstract

Agile development methodologies have become increasingly popular in software development. These methodologies emphasize interaction between the development team and stakeholders, as well as continuous delivery of working software, over heavy planning, documentation, and processes. While streamlining the development process can bring benefits during the project phase, the lack of documentation will inevitably lead to problems later in the system's lifecycle. Inadequate documentation makes software maintenance and further development challenging and time-consuming. Moreover, onboarding new developers and handing over the system from development to maintenance becomes more laborious. Despite these problems, the importance of documentation has received little attention in both the IT industry and information systems research. In the context of agile development, the discussion regarding documentation often merely requires it to be sufficient, without specifying what constitutes sufficient documentation. This thesis aimed to find answers to the question of how to produce sufficient documentation in agile software development. The research problem was approached by determining what information needs documentation users have and what practices and processes could fulfill these information needs. Based on these findings, the sufficiency of documentation was evaluated and the ways in which documentation practices could be integrated into the agile development process were explored. The study was conducted as a qualitative case study in a software consulting firm that delivers enterprise information systems. Empirical data was collected through semi-structured interviews with various system development experts, and the data was analyzed using thematic content analysis. The results emphasized the importance of aligning the production of documentation to the agile methodology and development process and the artifacts inherent to them. Additionally, the results implicated that documentation should avoid overlap with the source code and rather include information that cannot be conveyed through the code, such as information about the requirement that the functionality implements, the functional logic of the component, and the broader process that the described functionality is linked to.