“Writing is a form of thinking, whatever the subject,” says William Zinsser (Writing to Learn). If, as Zinsser says, learning to write well is critical to learning well, then agile team members might do well to work on their writing skills.

The entire results of software projects are writings. Whether the output is executable code, test scripts, requirements documents, training plans, or project status reports, they are all, in some fashion, writing. Writing is both a form of thinking and the results from that thinking—and unfortunately, technical education programs rarely focus on writing skills. Zinsser writes, “My hope was to demystify writing for the science types and to demystify science for the humanities types.” His working hypothesis is that “Writing and thinking and learning were the same process.”

Consider two of the long-standing problem areas in software development—requirements specification and Read more …