[a4isms]

As an exercise, change your statement from ”If you want rock solid documentation, switch to waterfall” to,” ”If you want rock solid tests, switch to waterfall.”

They have all the same organizational forces acting upon them. You don’t need all the tests to “ship a feature.” So some people can certainly skip some or all of them.

Switching to a highly iterative process neither worsens nor improves the quality/completeness of your test suite. Rapid evolution of features places pressure on keeping test suites current.

Iterative processes with good tests in place exist only because entire engineering departments have “gotten religion” about their value, and product managers have come to accept that it’s important to invest in tests. If they didn’t, they’d give engineers too much work in too little time to write tests.

And so on and so forth. Great tests and entire infrastructures around tests only happen when an entire organization buys into their value even if everyone knows you can get away with writing a negligible amount of test coverage and still ship a feature.

I submit it’s the same thing with documentation. It’s not a process problem, it’s an “embracing their value” problem. If you’re in a culture where tech writers are not considered as valuable as engineers, you will have crappy documentation no matter what you do to the process.