When coaching analysts, I often find myself telling them, all the tools they draw upon to question, to challenge, to refine and capture their understanding is important. Agile methods focus on better understanding of value, not better note taking. Writing things down does not automatically translate into understanding between two people. Cockburn’s already demonstrated a model that talks about the richness of communication methods, with written documentation being one of the worst.
The best business analysts I’ve worked with have little need to write things down, having absorbed what needs to be done, understood the real requirements, and constantly available ready to help clarify them. Conversely, the worst business analysts see their job only as writing “requests” and “demands” down, doing little to question and challenge what is really needed versus what is merely articulated. These I call overpaid scribes.
Question what value your tools are using and if they help you either better understand or better communicate with other people. If you find modelling in UML helps you better see relationships, do so but avoid spending all your time polishing the model and getting the syntax correct. Be wary of investing yourself too much in one particular model or document that makes you potentially more resistant to changing it. Neal Ford describes this as Irrational Artefact Attachment. If you find yourself writing something down to remind yourself of what is important to get across, do so but don’t use it as a way to avoid helping others understand it.
Agile methods appear nebulous to many people because “user stories” simply appear. It’s not prescriptive about how you get there because there are simply too many different ways to get there. Whilst being prescriptive will help some projects, it would no doubt hurt many others.
Image of Shh! taken from Anthony Gattine’s flickr stream under the Creative Commons Licence
