Some tips for appropriate (economical or thrifty) documentation:

  • Less (shorter) documentation can be often read and digested in shorter time (but beware of overly cryptic brevity, so no Perl, APG or regular expressions).
  • Less documentation implies fewer future changes or modifications.
  • Explicitly decide what kind and amount of documentation is appropriate, and with what level of detail.
  • Differentiate between short-lived, volatile documentation (i.e. flipcharts for your project work) and long-lived system documentation. See [tip V-6]{#tip-v-6}
  • Dare to leave gaps: Deliberately leave certain parts of your (arc42) documentation empty. Especially within arc42-section 8 (crosscutting concepts) you can often remove numerous subsections that might not be relevant for your specific system.

See question B-4 (Minimal amount of documentation)