Scrum and other flavors of Agile expect a potentially shippable product at the end of each Iteration or Sprint. This typically means that each user story within the Sprint has to be developed, integrated, tested, documented and made deployable to production. While this is not new, I have seen many variations to this in my experience with Agile teams. I am going to deal now only with the Release documentation part here. Everything else is out of scope for now.

Consider the scenario below.
In a reasonably small organization, we have the Product Marketing manager Laura who doubles up as Product manager of a desktop application GoldSpot that back-ends with a database server. Laura is responsible for pretty much everything on GoldSpot. She is always seen juggling and shuffling between business case evaluation, wire-framing, product backlog creation and constant prioritization, user acceptance testing, creation and updates to user and admin documentation, customer demos, marketing communication, etc. The product development team consists of 3 developers, 2 test engineers and a Scrum master. The team and Laura meet over Skype for the Sprint planning meeting, the daily standups, Sprint review and retrospectives. The team is in their third Sprint, have just created a prototype worth showing to customers and have 3 more Sprints to go in this Release.
Wanting to adhere to the practices of Scrum, the Scrum master asks Laura to update the User and Admin guides as part of each user story and each Sprint. However, Laura who is severely short of time, finds this to be an overhead to her. Here is her stance. “The product GoldSpot is atleast 3 Sprints away from the Beta Release and has a good amount of functionality and UI changes going in between now and then. If I make updates to the Beta documentation (User guide, Admin guide) in each Sprint, I will definitely have to revisit it in the coming Sprints and over write them when the UI or functionality changes. Also, I am the person who is providing demos to customers and know each feature well. I am showing GoldSpot to customers but not distributing it to them right now. In my backlog of tasks to do, I definitely feel that updating the guides is low priority and something that will move to the top of the list in the final Sprint or the one before that. This is like the customer communication or the training that we do when we get close to the Beta Release.”
I definitely feel that Laura has a point and while Scrum advocates a potentially shippable product at the end of each Sprint, it does not really go into the specifics of what makes the product potentially shippable. I have seen this model work well for Scrum teams where the Release documentation is written by the Product Manager or by a Technical Writer who is spread thin across different products.

Is it then time to take the “Release documentation update” activity out of the Sprint’s Definition of done? Or should we persist on getting it done in each Sprint?

Let me know what you think.