Earlier, I wrote a blog on how to write a winner design document when working in Agile Scrum methodology. The blog has been based on my experience while working with distributed SCRUM manner.
Disbelief in Design Documentation for Agile SCRUM
I have come across various sections of people who did not believe in design document at all when working in SCRUM manner. Their argument has been that SCRUM is all about encouraging technical discussions through different manners such as white-boarding etc and, adopting design documentation just kills the overall objective. I agree to some extent given the entire team is working at one place and could do quick discussions including white-boarding. However, with distributed scrum, this may be difficult to do quick discussions and resolve issues then and there, when people work in different time zones under different conditions with different culture background.
This is where design document helps a lot to convey thoughts in a common language, English with various different relevant diagrams.
Genuine Resistance to Design Modeling Tools
In my experience, developers have shown resistance to various different design modelling tools because of various reasons such as mindset related with SCRUM, learning curve with the tool, time taken to create the diagram etc. They always wanted a tool where learning curve along with the time taken to draw the diagram is very less.
We tried various different tools such as that provided by LucidChart, but one tool that has been a winner in terms of developers adoption is WebSequenceDiagram.
WebSequenceDiagram tool(in brief)
The websequencediagram tool helps to create quick sequence diagrams in no time. The tool has shown a great adoption across developers working in distributed SCRUM style.
The tool is very powerful primarily due to the reason that the developers don’t have to really draw the diagrams. All that needed to be done to create a diagram is write a sequence of instructions (suggested by tool;easy to learn) and that’s it. The diagram gets generated based on the instructions. The beauty of the tool is that it is extremely easy to learn for developers of varying experience and thus, sees greater adoption than any other tool. One does not need to learn UML to make these diagrams. Another cool aspect is that the tool is very cost-effective.
So, if you have been looking for a tool for design documentation for your SCRUM teams, websequencediagram is the answer.
DISCLAIMER: I do not belong to the websequencediagram team nor I have friends there who asked me to write so. This is just based on my experience. I am in no way trying to influence your decision regarding the tool. Thus, do appropriate evaluation before buying the tool.
Check out my latest book titled as First Principles Thinking: Building winning products using first principles thinking.
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I found it very helpful. However the differences are not too understandable for me