Agile Documentation Best Practices: What the Manifesto Actually Says in 2026

There's a phrase that gets invoked in engineering teams whenever someone suggests that documentation needs attention. It goes like this:

"But the Agile Manifesto says working software over comprehensive documentation."

And then the documentation doesn't happen.

This is a misreading of the Manifesto — and it's quietly costing teams a lot of money.

What the Manifesto actually says

Here's the full line: "We value working software over comprehensive documentation."

The word doing the work there is 'over'. Not 'instead of'. The Manifesto is stating a priority — between two goods, prefer one over the other — not a prohibition.

The same section of the Manifesto explicitly acknowledges: "That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more."

The Manifesto's authors weren't arguing against documentation. They were arguing against the waterfall model's habit of producing enormous specification documents before writing a single line of code. That's a specific kind of documentation — upfront, speculative, and disconnected from working software.

The documentation that Agile teams actually need

The question isn't whether to document. It's what to document, when, and for whom.

Agile documentation should be:

• Just enough — covering what stakeholders actually need, not everything that could theoretically be documented
• Just in time — produced when the work is done and the information is accurate, not months before
• Tied to the work — linked to the issues, sprints, and releases it describes, so context is preserved
• Maintained — updated when the product changes, not left to become a historical artefact

By these criteria, the annual 200-page specification document is exactly what the Manifesto is warning against. But a consistent, current, automated release note is the opposite — it embodies Agile documentation principles.

The real cost of no documentation

When teams use the Manifesto to justify skipping documentation entirely, the costs are real — they just accumulate slowly and show up elsewhere:

• Support cost — customers can't find answers themselves and create tickets instead
• Onboarding time — new team members and new customers have no reference material
• Lost context — decisions made during a sprint live only in someone's memory, gone when they leave
• Discovery gap — features that aren't documented effectively don't get adopted

None of these costs appear in a sprint report. They show up in support ticket volume, churn data, and onboarding time. They're real, and they're preventable.

How automation resolves the tension

The honest reason documentation gets skipped in Agile teams isn't philosophical — it's practical. Sprints are fast. The team is stretched. Writing documentation is slow and it competes with shipping.

Automation removes the competition. When documentation is generated automatically from sprint data, it doesn't compete with shipping because it happens as a result of shipping. No extra time, no extra effort, no choosing between the two.

This is the version of Agile documentation that the Manifesto's authors would probably endorse: lightweight, timely, accurate, and automatic.

A practical framework for Agile documentation

Here's how to think about documentation in an Agile team without fighting your process:

Automate the recurring stuff

Release notes, sprint summaries, and stakeholder updates happen every sprint. They follow the same pattern every time. These are exactly what automation is designed for — configure once, get consistent output forever.

Write deliberately for complex decisions

Architecture decisions, significant design trade-offs, and major technical choices deserve intentional documentation. These can't be automated from ticket data; they require human authorship. Budget time for them explicitly.

Link documentation to the work

Every piece of documentation should connect back to the tickets, epics, or sprints it describes. This makes it findable, verifiable, and maintainable when the product evolves.

Review and retire

Set a retention policy. Documentation older than X months without a review flag should either be updated or archived. Stale documentation is often worse than no documentation — it misleads rather than informs.

FastDoc and Agile documentation

FastDoc was built around the Agile principle of just-in-time documentation. It reads from your Jira data at the moment work completes and generates structured documentation automatically — release notes, sprint summaries, help articles — without adding anything to your sprint backlog.

Native Atlassian app. No workflow changes required. Free for 30 days.

Install FastDoc from the Atlassian Marketplace and make documentation a natural outcome of every sprint.