Vitaliy wrote:

> You keep covering your ears, and screaming "AGILE IS CRAP BECAUSE
> VIDEO IS BAD DOCUMENTATION!". 

No. You scream. You are the only one who screams here. Feel free to
actually read the messages and find a single place where anybody besides
you has screamed. 

> can _you_ read, Gerhard? 

Should I answer this? It seems that only a moron can ask such a
question.

> "Communication", not "documentation"

As I wrote before, (good) documentation /is/ communication. This is
/obvious/. If your documentation doesn't communicate anything, it really
wasn't worth writing.

And while "Communication" is the title of the article, it seems to me
the article has contents also. And the curve I'm talking about, kind of
hidden below the title, in the contents of the article, is named
"Documentation". For a reason, I presume.

> To most people, it is obvious that a video conference is a more
> efficient way to communicate, than passing on a spec.

I don't know who those "most people" you cite are. Maybe they are
semi-illiterate? (I think "most people" in fact are semi or fully
illiterate.) It's definitely not obvious to me. Watching videos takes
too much time. I skipped most of the basic lectures in university,
because it is not an efficient means to get some stuff presented.
(Except for the few "spirited" lecturers, of course, but they were rare
in the basic courses.) Reading up on the stuff, I could do it in a
fraction of the time required. And I could explain it to the ones who
attended the lectures regularly.

I still wait for anyone to say "yes, I'd find it really helpful to have
datasheets in video form; it would help me get so much more efficient".
Datasheets may be an extreme example, but they are just documentation,
"a spec" as you seem to call it. 

I also refer back to the billing system. Can you imagine a video
"documenting" this billing system? Instead of condensing all the
information into a readable and searchable document, they could have
simply shot videos from all the meetings they had with members of the
different departments where they discussed the thousands of individual
procedures and how they are related. That video would probably take a
few months to watch. Doesn't seem very efficient to me.


>>> It's funny when people diss on certain aspects of lean development,
>>> and try to convince me that it cannot work
>>
>> Who said that it cannot work? You really should avoid trying to defend
>> what hasn't been attacked.
> 
> I refer you once again to Rolf's attempt at agile comedy. And to be
> fair, to some of your and Olin's posts as well.

You don't refer to squat. I never said that it cannot work, that's why
you can't come up with real examples. Repeating this doesn't change
this. All I said is that there are situations where some of the rules
don't hold, some of the approaches don't work well and alternatives work
better. And I stand by this, and nothing what you have brought up so far
has had anything to do with this. You seem to be arguing against people
who are saying that "it cannot work" (in general), but there are no such
people. All anybody ever said is that they have seen certain situations
where it didn't or couldn't work. Which you, if you had a bit of
humility inside yourself, could just accept. But I guess some do and
can, and some don't and can't. 

Gerhard
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