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:

• PairProgramming
• DocumentLast
• AutomateProcesses

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.

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CategoryProcessPattern