No specs?

"Agile developers just hop in before creating specs. This is because they know that the requirements will not be known up front, and have to be discovered during development." Is that true? Not entirely. What we do is refine the sketch that we make in the beginning of the project. Little by little, these specs become more and more complete, and we get more and more insight as to the true extent of the project.

At OpendTect, we keep the specs in wikis. These are nicely free-form, and it's easy to annotate with states 'done' or 'still need weeks to get this right'. Also time estimates go in there naturally. If something gives more trouble than expected, break it up in sub-bullets.

This particular example shows everything in green = done. My work. Hehe.

The nice thing is that there's always an overview on where we stand, and signs of problems can be seen rather easily. Also, it's very reviewable. Together with the executable system that should be updated as much as possible, you have a nice overview of the system: where are we now, what is still left. Prioritization is also easy to do. Just add a little tag to all items - the fun thing is you can do it on every level you want. You can tag a whole sub-tree as [Priority: High], or [Leave till the end].

Of course, in the end, the executable deliverable - that is the core of Agile work. Claiming something is one thing, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. But having a good backbone of the approach is a very important ingredient in getting there reliably.