A special case of this practice is distinguishing documents (that have to be updated) from records (that need not to be updated) from documents (that have to be updated). Documents contain information that needs to be updated. The cost of a document is therefore not only the cost of creating it initially. The stakeholder in need of the information provided by the document has to take care of maintenance costs that arise due to required updates. Documents have different frequencies of change, therefore some documents have higher maintenance costs than others. A record is a representation that stores the information of an event. The information is immutable and therefore does not need to get updated. The maintenance costs of records is therefore very low or zero. The determination which pages are records and which are not is the most important application of this practice. Records sometimes appear in the form of reports. | Example Box |
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Journal entries are per default not subject to change. Each entry is a record. Journals allow team members to take individual notes or develop a topic before it is part of the team or public documentation. Journals also exist for teams to manage information collected during a sprint. |
Documents contain information that needs to be updated. The cost of a document is therefore not only the cost of creating it initially. The stakeholder in need of the information provided by the document has to take care of maintenance costs that arise due to required updates. Documents have different frequencies of change, therefore some documents have higher maintenance costs than othersStakeholders should always be clear about whether a given piece of information is part of a document or a record. | Example Box |
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If a stakeholder demands a defined piece of information the team that creates this document must determine if the stakeholder assumes that the document reflects the current state of the project at any time. If this is true, the stakeholder is required to asset a certain amount of resources for the update of this document. The team should make clear that handling the document as a record is an option for the stakeholder. The report is current at the time it is delivered. When the stakeholder needs a current version of the document the work for creating a new record based on the information of the previous record can be scheduled for the next iteration. |
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