“Go DEEP” with artefacts
The agile manifesto did not say we shouldn’t document anything. Distributed projects are chaotic to run without artefacts.
The DEEP acronym helps you remember what you must document on distributed teams
This doesn’t mean you must document everything, but I advise being pragmatic and documenting the stable stuff. The DEEP acronym provides you a mnemonic to remember what to document.
D for Decisions. Teams make many decisions over their lifetime. Each time you decide something, document it in a way that someone who wasn’t involved in the decision can understand why you did something a certain way.
E for Events. Meetings, workshops, town halls – they’re all events. By documenting these, you persist the outcomes and knowledge from these interactions.
E for Explanations. Every project has a body of knowledge. Instead of repeating these verbally to each other, write things down. Or record them. Create once, share many times.
P for Proposals. In the lifetime of a project, the team and its stakeholders will share many ideas and plans. Whether we implement these or not, it helps to document the thought process and the details of such proposals. Not only does it foster decision hygiene, but it also helps build the collective memory of the team.
You can remind your teammates of this play and acronym, by just saying
“Let’s go DEEP, folks!”