“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” –Groucho Marx

Outside your extreme programming project, you will probably need documentation: by all means, write it. Inside your project, there is so much verbal communication that you may need very little else.Trust yourselves to know the difference.

Here’s a bit of a rant I wrote some time back, talking about how to write the manuals for an XP project by using writers as part of the team. It’s a serious proposal, written with tongue a bit in cheek.

Extreme Programming is a discipline of software development based on values of simplicity, communication, feedback, and courage. It works by bringing the whole team together in the presence of simple practices, with enough feedback to enable the team to see where they are and to tune the practices to their unique situation.