Oral Tradition
Forces:
- You want information about your project to be shared amongst team members
- You don't want written documentation (see ProblemsWithDocumentation)
Technique: Share information orally. Establish a culture in which people communicate frequently and are willing to ask others to explain things.
Resulting Forces:
- All members of the team must have regular contact with each other.
- Newcomers will require a lot of individual help to get up to speed.
- The information won't survive if the entire team leaves.
- This technique may only work when everybody works in the same room. My successes with it seem to have been partly because people could easily overhear others' conversations. I haven't pushed the limits and seen where it fails, though. --JimLittle
Known Uses:
- ExtremeProgramming projects
Related Patterns:
Concerns:
- Oral explanation can be difficult for some people, physically or psychologically. Some people simply can't explain things well, or have a severe speech impediment.
- In a socially broken environment, people may hoard important information that they'd otherwise be forced to write down.
- Oral storytelling requires that the story be re-told many times, which can introduce error, while a physical document needs to be written only once, and can be refactored. The oral tradition might be compared with requiring each person who edits a Wiki page to re-write the entire page from memory every time they edit it.
- The team may have difficulty migrating to the oral tradition due to the oral tradition's lack of defined process. This is not a problem with the oral tradition itself, but it is a factor in its adoption.
- Oral explanation requires at least 2 people who must be in constant contact, and most shops have enough deadline crunches that this can be difficult to arrange
Alternatives
-
Use a ProjectWiki or TeamWiki to capture information that would otherwise be OralTradition. This addresses several of the resulting forces and concerns above:
- Newcomers can use it to get up to speed without requiring such a lot of individual help.
- The information will survive if the entire team leaves.
- This technique can work when everybody doesn't work in the same room (or the same time zone). (See discussion at TeamWiki.)
- Explanation does not require 2 people to be in constant contact: a question can be posed, the explanation Wiki'd, and the Wiki page read, at separate times.