Stay Close to The Software

Keep everything as close to the software as possible. Accumulations of artifacts in systems disconnected from your software can be debts rather than assets. That stuff you put on a wiki two years ago may be irrelevant, confusing and stale for anyone who comes across it now. Who knows? Is anyone maintaining it now? The software has developed a lot since anyone refactored those. Those tickets in the backlog from 2 years ago might also have been a waste of time, unless producing them was good for communication.

The time and thought that goes into producing external artifacts like tickets, epics, spreadsheets, spec documents, acceptance criteria, wiki pages, diagrams, images, sketches, wireframes, etc may be good to help teams communicate and to come to common understanding about the overall goals for the software. But, if they don’t directly evolve into the real product, their accumulation is not a virtue in itself.

If you stay close to the software, your documents, verbiage, images, comments and plans have the potential to evolve directly into the real software or at least provide context that can be linked directly to the code that it describes. In this way, everything can get maintained and updated together and things don’t become lost, stale or forgotten.