Sometimes I write a lot of explanatory and other documentation, mainly because it helps ME distil and understand what I'm doing. This docco may or may not help anyone else, but the fact it helped me makes it valuable. 1/

How does this sit with "we value working software over comprehensive documentation?" If I am building a software product, I would never make documentation a bottleneck. I would write just enough such that my team and I know what we're doing, & could hand over to another team. 2/

So what am I getting at? The manifesto authors were talking about documentation /milestones/, not in general. They value a working product over an FRD. It's important to embrace rather than demonise documentation. Even if it's not useful to you, it might be to someone else. 3/

It might have helped them work through a problem and/or solution, figure out what's important and not, what the options are. Celebrate the docco process. Delete stuff that no one has read in years, and don't undermine the process and the craft of expression through writing.