ICT Knowledge Hub Recap: Working Documentation over Comprehensive Confusion

The evening was attended by just under 20 participants. The session followed a question-and-answer format, with all attendees enthusiastically contributing a range of sharp insights:

• Incorrect or missing knowledge is the primary source of problems, delays, and frustrations in our daily work.
• As knowledge is lost within an organization, organizations tend to become increasingly conservative in how they adapt and maintain their products.
• Maintaining existing documentation is often neglected. As a result, documents become increasingly unreliable until we no longer trust the documentation and consider it "unusable."
• We often integrate knowledge sharing and knowledge preservation in unhelpful ways: from pointless process box-ticking to documentation anarchy, but rarely with a clear vision of the what and the why.
• The process of preserving and sharing knowledge is frequently hindered by cumbersome, isolated, and fragmented knowledge systems.

Fortunately, the evening also presented a vision for how things can be improved. Johan van Berkel shared his insights into how Behavior Driven Development consciously cultivates the building and preservation of knowledge in a way that genuinely aligns with the Agile Manifesto. Systematically elaborating desired behavior—from customer goal to implementation—safeguarding shared understanding and language through the "Three Amigos," and describing system behavior as "executable specifications" ensure that knowledge creation and preservation are valuable and fully integrated into the complete product lifecycle.

The evening concluded with a possible answer to the final question: how can we make the management, maintenance, and publication of documentation itself as accessible as possible? Attendees were given a live demonstration that picks up where Behavior Driven Development leaves off. By integrating documentation into code repositories, we can not only manage documentation as code but also use decades-old technology to automatically publish knowledge as websites—with all the associated capabilities and user convenience.

Would you like to learn more about the Living Documentation tool? Contact Johan van Berkel and/or read his LinkedIn article about how the tool came to be.