Documentation

A word on documentation -- without appropriate documentation, your work is worthless. You need to be able to communicate to other people HOW you got where you got and what you got IS.

Also, we contractually promised the sponsors they would get reports. But the first point is more important. Engineering is not about going into a cave, doing some work by yourself, and expecting everyone else to look at whatever artifact you left and seeing how brilliant it is and why you made the choices you made. Some key advice:

• Documentation at the end is old school. Documentation during the process is doing Agile/Scrum right.
• Ask your sponsor what information they want in the documentation and about their documentation culture.
• Think about the poor soul(s) who will take on this project next. The next SCOPE team. Your liaison when they've walked away from the project for 6 months. Some new employee at your sponsor's company. You should be documenting for them all as part of the act of getting work done in each sprint.
• Remember that you forget faster than you think you do. In 2 months, you won't remember the detail of what you did or why, so document it.
• Things break. Code breaks. Mechanical things break. The people who loved your project and want to continue it need to know what's under the hood, so to speak.
• Brevity is beautiful and consistent with scrum. It is also hard to be concise and clear. It takes work and practice.