While doing research for a client, I came across a very interesting paper entitled “Efficient Authoring of Software Documentation Using RaPiD7.”

Agile practices generally encourage using automated test suites as living documentation for a system under development. Agile says do the least amount of static documentation that will work because it will invariably diverge from reality and quickly become useless. How many thick software documents have you seen sitting on a shelf doing no one any good and existing entirely out of date? Exactly.

Still, because of corporate, regulatory, or other factors, extensive, formal software documentation is often times required. In these cases, these documents are best thought of as a product to be delivered along with the software itself. So, how do we do documentation in a smart, effective, Agile way?